


% 

w 












,0o. 






- 
















































<p 





















*, V* 






, 0o x. 



5 AV 



% 


























*v. 






, 










































y 












v ^ 

! 












- 















V <p„ 





















ASPECTS OF FICTION 

AND OTHER VENTURES IN 
CRITICISM 



BY 



BRANDER MATTHEWS 



W.A 



THIRD EDITION, ENLARGED 



i * t a i >>>>>> > 

' ' • ' ' ' J '<J ' j 3 > 1 i > i 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1902 



K\ 






THF LIBRARY O 
CONGRESS, 

Two Gowtf Rlcsivfd 

5 1902 

C'-ASS GLrYXc Vo. 



Copyright, 1896, by 
HARPER & BROTHERS 



Copyright, 1902, by 
BRANDER MATTHEWS 

A II rights reserved 
Published September, 1902 



THE CAXTON PRESS 
NEW YORK. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. American Literature 3 

II. Two Studies of the South ....... 25 

III. The Penalty of Humor . ' 43 

IV. On Pleasing the Taste of the Public . . 59 
V. On Certain Parallelisms Between the 

Ancient Drama and the Modern . . 83 

VI. The Importance of the Folk-Theatre . . 101 
VII. Two French Dramatic Critics: 

I. M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 133 

II. M. JULES LEMAITRE 153 

VIII. Two Scotsmen of Letters: 

I. MR. ANDREW LANG 177 

II. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 202 

IX. Aspects of Fiction: 

I. THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING .... 215 

II. CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING & CO. . . . 236 

III. THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANCOIS COPPEE 256 

IV. THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC 

HALEVY 270 

V. MR. CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER AS A 

WRITER OF FICTION 280 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



[This address was delivered before the National Educational 
Association, at Buffalo, July 8, 1896.] 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 

The history of mankind is little more than 
the list of the civilizations that have arisen one 
on the ruin of the other, the Roman supplant- 
ing the Greek, as the Assyrian had been ousted 
by the Babylonian. The life of each of these 
successive civilizations was proportioned to 
the vitality of the ideas by which it was ani- 
mated ; and we cannot estimate it or even under- 
stand it except in so far as we are able to grasp 
these underlying principles. What the ideas 
were which dominated these vanished civiliza- 
tions it is for us to discover for ourselves as 
best we may by a study of all the records they 
left behind them, and especially by a reverent 
examination of their laws, their arts, and their 
writings in so far as these have been preserved 
to us. Of all these relics of peoples now dead 
and gone, none is so instructive as literature, 
and none is so interesting; by its aid we are 
enabled to reconstruct the past, as we are also 
helped to understand the present. 



4 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Of the literatures which thus explain to us 
our fellow-man as he was and as he is, three 
seem to me pre-eminent, standing out and 
above the others not only by reason of the 
greater number of men of genius who have 
illustrated them, but also by reason of their 
own more persistent strength and their own 
broader variety. These three literatures are 
the Greek, the French, and the English. 

There are great names in the other modern 
languages, no doubt — the names of Dante and 
of Cervantes and of Goethe, than which, in- 
deed, there are none greater. In French litera- 
ture, however, and in English there are not 
wanting names as mighty as these. Fortunate- 
ly, the possession of genius is not the privilege 
of any one language, of any one country, or 
of any one century. Where French literature 
and English can claim superiority over Italian, 
Spanish, and German is rather in sustaining 
a higher average of excellence for a longer pe- 
riod of time. The literature of the Italian lan- 
guage, of the Spanish, and of the German has 
no such beadroll of writers of the first rank as 
illustrates the literature of the French and of 
the English. 

There is perhaps no more manly instrument 
of precision than the Latin language, none 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 5 

which better repays the struggle for its mastery ; 
but Latin literature, if not second-rate, when 
tried by the loftiest standards, is at least sec- 
ondary, being transplanted from Greece and 
lacking resolute roots in its own soil. Nor is 
any dispute possible as to the high value of 
Hebrew literature ; as Coleridge declared with 
characteristic insight, " sublimity is Hebrew by 
birth "; but Hebrew literature has not the wide 
range of the Greek, nor its impeccable beauty. 

" Art is only form," said Georges Sand ; and 
Goethe declared that the "highest operation 
of art is form-giving." If we accept these say- 
ings there is no need to dwell on the supreme 
distinction of Greek literature, for it is only in 
Greek that we find the undying perfection of 
form. It is there only that we have clear and 
deep thought always beautifully embodied. 
Indeed, truth and beauty govern Greek litera- 
ture so absolutely that, old as it is, it seems to 
us ever fresh and eternally young. After two 
thousand years and more it strikes us to-day 
as startlingly modern. Thoreau — whose own 
phrase was often Attic in its delicate precision 
— Thoreau asked, " What are the classics but 
the noblest recorded thoughts of man ? They 
are the only oracles that are not decayed." 

Nevertheless, the world has kept restlessly 



6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

moving since the fall of Athens, and mankind 
has developed needs that the Greeks knew not. 
As Moliere puts it pithily, " The ancients are 
the ancients, and we are the men of to-day." 
There are questions in America now, and not 
a few of them, undreamed of in Sparta ; and 
for the answers to these it is vain to go to 
Greek literature, modern as it may be in so 
many ways. 

French literature has not a little of the mod- 
eration and of the charm of Greek literature. 
It is not violent ; it is not boisterous, even ; it 
is never freakish. It has balance and order 
and a broad sanity. It has an unfailing sense 
of style. It has lightness of touch, and it has 
also and always intellectual seriousness. The 
literature is like the language ; and Voltaire 
declared that what was not clear was not 
French. And the language itself is the fit in- 
strument of the people who use it and who 
have refined it for their needs — a people logi- 
cal beyond all others, gifted in mathematics, 
devoid of hypocrisy, law-abiding, governed by 
the social instinct, inheritors of the Latin tra- 
dition and yet infused with the Celtic spirit. 

To those of us who are controlled by the 
Anglo-Saxon ideals, whether or not we come 
of English stock, to those of us who adhere to 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 7 

Anglo-Saxon conventions, no other literature 
can serve as a better corrective of our inherited 
tendencies than the French. The chief char- 
acteristic of English literature is energy, power 
often ill-restrained, vigor often superabundant. 
From the earliest rude war-songs of the stal- 
wart Saxon fighters who were beginning to 
make the English language, to the latest short 
story setting forth the strife of an American 
mining camp, there is never any lack of force 
in English literature. There is always the 
Teutonic boldness and rudeness — the Teutonic 
readiness to push forward and to shoulder the 
rest of the world out of the way — the Teutonic 
independence that leads every man to fight for 
his own hand, like the smith in Scott's story. 
What we do not discover in English literature, 
with all its overmastering vitality, is economy 
of effort, the French self-control, the Greek 
sense of form. 

French literature and English literature have 
existed side by side for many centuries, each 
of them influencing the other now and again, 
and yet each of them preserving its own indi- 
viduality always, and ever revealing the domi- 
nant characteristics of the people speaking its 
language. We need not attempt to weigh 
them one against the other, and to measure 



8 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

them with a foot-rule, and to declare which is 
the greater. Equal they may be in the past 
and in the present ; equal in the future they 
are not likely to be. The qualities which make 
French literature what it is tend also to keep 
the French race from expansion ; just as the 
qualities which make English literature what 
it is have sent the English-speaking stock forth 
to fill up the waste places of the earth, and to 
wrest new lands from hostile savages or from 
inhospitable nature. 

French was the language of the courts of 
Europe when English was little better than a 
dialect of rough islanders. When Chaucer 
chose his native English as the vehicle of his 
verse, he showed both courage and prescience 
— a courage and a prescience lacking in Bacon, 
who lived two hundred years later, and who 
did not feel himself insured against Time until 
his great work was safely entombed in Latin. 
Even at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury there were more men and women in the 
world speaking French than there were speak- 
ing English. But now at the end of the nine- 
teenth century, with the steady spread of our 
stock into the four quarters of the world, there 
are more than twice as many people using 
English as there are using French. 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 9 

And the end is not yet, for while four-fifths 
of those who have French for their mother- 
tongue abide in France or along its borders, 
not a third of those who have English for 
their mother-tongue dwell in England. Not 
only in England, Ireland, and Scotland is 
English spoken, and in all the many British 
colonies which encompass the globe about — it 
is also the native speech of the people of the 
United States. English is the language of the 
stock which bids fair to prove itself the most 
masterful, hardy, and prolific, and which seems 
to possess a marvellous faculty for assimilating 
members of other allied stems and of getting 
these newly received elements to accept its 
own hereditary ideals. 

English literature is likely, therefore, to be- 
come in the future relatively more important 
and absolutely more influential. As there has 
been no relaxing of energy among the peoples 
that now speak the English language, probably 
there will be no alteration of the chief charac- 
teristic of English literature, although in time 
the changes of environment must make more 
or less modification inevitable. It will be cu- 
rious to see in a century how the ideals and 
the practices of the race will alter, after the 
race is no longer pent up in an island, after it 



IO ASPECTS OF FICTION 

has scattered itself over the world and assim- 
ilated other elements and adjusted itself to 
other social organizations. Here in America 
we can see already some of these results, for 
already is the American differentiated from 
the Englishman. We may not be able to 
declare clearly wherein the difference consists ; 
but we all recognize it plainly enough. 

Colonel Higginson has suggested that the 
American has an added drop more of nervous 
fluid than the Englishman. It is perhaps ap- 
parent already that the American is swifter 
than the Englishman, slighter in build, spring- 
ier in gait. Social changes are as evident as 
physical. Lowell remarked that if it was a 
good thing for an English duke that he had no 
social superior, it surely was not a bad thing 
for a Yankee farmer. Socially the American 
is less girt in by caste than the Englishman. 
These differences, obvious in life, are visible also 
in literature. We feel now, even if we do not 
care to define, the unlikeness of the writing of 
the British authors to the writing of the Amer- 
ican authors. Neither man nor nature is the 
same in Great Britain as it is in the United 
States ; and of necessity, therefore, there cannot 
be any identity between the points of view of 
the men of letters of the two countries. 



AMERICAN LITERATURE II 

In time, as there come to be more writers in 
Canada, we shall have a perspective from yet 
another point of view; and in due season 
others will be presented to us from Australia 
and from India. No doubt these future authors 
will cherish the tradition of English literature 
as loyally as we Americans cherish it here in 
the United States — as loyally as the British 
cherish it in the little group of islands which 
was once the home of the ancestors of us all. 
Race characteristics are inexorable, and it is 
very unlikely that there will ever be any ir- 
reconcilable divergence between these sepa- 
rate divisions of the English-speaking peoples. 
English literature will continue to flourish as 
sturdily as ever after the parent stem has 
parted into five branches. All of these branches 
will take the same pride in their descent from 
a common stock and in their possession of a 
common literature and of a common language. 
A common language, I say, for the English 
language belongs to all those who use it, 
whether they live in London or in Chicago or 
in Melbourne. 

It is not a little strange that it should now 
ever be needful to say that the British have no 
more ownership of the English language than 
we Americans have. The English language is 



12 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

the mother-tongue of the inhabitants of the 
British Isles, but so is it also the mother-tongue 
of the inhabitants of the United States. It is! 
not a loan to us, which may be recalled ; it is 
not a gift, which we have accepted ; it is a 
heritage, which we derived from our fore- 
fathers. We hold it by right of birth, and our 
title to it is just as good as the title of our kin 
across the sea. No younger brother's portion 
is it that we claim in the English language, but 
a whole and undivided half. It is an American 
possession as it is a British possession, no more 
and no less ; and we hold it on the same terms 
that our cousins do. We have the rights of 
ownership, and the responsibilities also, exactly 
as they have and to exactly the same extent. 
The English language belongs to us also ; it is 
ours to use as we please, just as the common 
law is ours, to modify according to our own 
needs; it is ours for us to keep pure and 
healthy ; and it is ours for us to hand down to 
our children unimpaired in strength and in 
subtlety. 

And as the language is a possession common 
to all the English-speaking peoples, so also is 
the literature. A share in the fame of Chaucer 
and of Shakespeare, of Milton and of Dryden, 
is part of the inheritance of every one of us 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 13 

who has English for his mother-tongue, what- 
ever his father-land. If there be anywhere a 
great poet or novelist or historian, it matters 
not where his birth or his residence or what 
his nationality, if he makes use of the English 
language he is contributing to English litera- 
ture. To distinguish the younger divisions of 
English literature from the elder, we shall have 
to call that elder division British ; meaning 
thereby that portion of our common literature 
which is now produced by those who were left 
behind in the old home when the rest of the 
family went forth one by one to make their 
way in the world. Thus English literature, 
which was one and undivided till the end of 
the eighteenth century, has now in the nine- 
teenth century two chief divisions — British and 
American ; and it bids fair in the twentieth cen- 
tury to have three more — Canadian, Austra- 
lian, and Indian. 

Some such distinction between the several 
existing divisions of the English literature of 
our own time is needful, and it will be found 
useful. Absurd and very misleading is the 
antithesis sometimes made between American 
literature and English, since the American is 
but one of the divisions of the English litera- 
ture of our time. Not long ago a pupil of one 



14 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

of the best private schools in New York main- 
tained that American literature is just as im- 
portant as English literature, producing in 
proof two companion manuals, of the same 
size externally, although of course internally 
on a wholly different scale. Such a lack of 
proportion in the treatment of different parts 
of the literature of the English language is 
foolish and harmful. But a comparison of 
American literature with the merely British 
literature of to-day might be proper enough. 
What we need to grasp clearly is the fact that 
the stream of English literature had only one 
channel until the end of the last century, and 
that in this century it has two channels. The 
new mouth that this massive current has made 
for itself is American ; — and so we are com- 
pelled to call the old mouth British. 

Through which of these channels the fuller 
stream shall flow in the next century no man 
can foretell to-day. It is a fact that the popu- 
lation of these United States is now nearly 
twice as large as the population of the British 
Isles, and not inferior in ability or in energy. 
But it is a fact also that in America a smaller 
proportion of the ability and the energy of the 
people seems to be devoted to the cause of 
letters. In a new country life itself offers the 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 1 5 

widest opportunities ; and literature here has 
keener rivals and more of them than it can 
have in a land which has been cleared and 
tilled and tended since a time whereof the 
memory of man runneth not to the contrary. 
The earliest Americans had other duties than 
the writing of books : they had to lay deep the 
broad foundations of this mighty nation. It 
was more than two hundred years after the 
establishment of the first trading-post on the 
island of Manhattan when Washington Irving 
published the ' Sketch Book,' the first work 
of American authorship to win a wide popu- 
larity beyond the borders of our own country 
— before Fenimore Cooper a little later pub- 
lished the ' Spy,' the first work of American 
authorship to win a wide popularity beyond 
the borders of our own language. We may 
say that American literature is now but little 
older than the threescore years and ten allot- 
ted as the span of a man's natural life. 

We had had authors, it is true, in the 
eighteenth century, and at least two of these, 
Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, 
hold high rank ; but it was not until towards 
the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth 
century that we began really to have a litera- 
ture. It is scarcely an overstatement to say 



1 6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

that there are men alive to-day who are as old 
as American literature is. But in the past 
three-quarters of a century American litera- 
ture has taken root firmly and blossomed 
forth abundantly and spread itself abroad 
sturdily. Emerson followed Edwards and 
Franklin. Hawthorne and Poe came after 
Irving and Cooper. Bryant proved that Nat- 
ure here in America was fit for the purposes 
of Art ; and he was succeeded by Longfellow 
and Lowell, by Whittier and Holmes. 

During these same threescore years and ten 
there were great writers in the other branch 
of the literature of our language, in British 
literature, perhaps greater writers than there 
were here in America, and of a certainty there 
were more of them. There is no need now 
to call the roll of the mighty men of letters 
alive in England at the middle of this century. 
But much as we admire these British authors, 
much as we respect them, I do not think that 
they are as close to us as the authors of our 
own country ; we do not cherish them with 
the same affection. Just as the modern lit- 
eratures are nearer to us than the ancient, 
because we ourselves are modern, just as 
English literature is nearer to us than French, 
because we ourselves speak English, so the 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 1 7 

American division of that literature is closer 
to us than the British. It helps us to under- 
stand one another, and it explains us to our- 
selves. If we accept the statement that, after 
all, literature is only a criticism of life, it is 
of value in proportion as its criticism of life 
is truthful. Surely it needs no argument to 
show that the life it is most needful for us 
Americans to have criticised truthfully is our 
own life. It is only in our own literature that 
we can hope to learn the truth about our- 
selves ; and this indeed is what we must al- 
ways insist upon in our literature — the truth, 
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 
Lowell reminded us that Goethe went to the 
root of the matter when he said that " people 
are always talking of the study of the ancients ; 
yet what does this mean but apply yourself 
to the actual world and seek to express it, 
since this is what the ancients did when they 
were alive ?" 

As we consider the brief history of the 
American branch of English literature, we can 
see that the growth of a healthy feeling in re- 
gard to it has been hindered by two unfort- 
unate failings — provincialism and colonialism. 
By provincialism I mean the spirit of Little 
Pedlington, the spirit that makes swans of all 



1 8 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

our geese. By colonialism I mean the atti- 
tude of looking humbly towards the old coun- 
try for guidance and for counsel even about 
our own affairs. 

Provincialism is local pride unduly inflated. 
It is the temper that is ready to hail as a Swan 
of Avon any local gosling w r ho has taught 
himself to make an unnatural use of his own 
quills. It is always tempting us to stand on 
tiptoe to proclaim our own superiority. It 
prevents our seeing ourselves in proper pro- 
portion to the rest of the world. It leads to 
the preparation of school-manuals in which 
the three-score years and ten of American lit- 
erature are made equal in importance to the 
thousand years of literature produced in Great 
Britain. It tends to render a modest writer, 
like Longfellow, ridiculous by comparing him 
implicitly with the half-dozen world-poets. In 
the final resort, no doubt, every people must 
be the judge of its own authors; but before 
that final judgment is rendered every people 
consults the precedents and measures its own 
local favorites by the cosmopolitan and eternal 
standards. 

Colonialism is shown in the timid deference 
towards foreign opinion about our own deeds 
and in the unquestioning acceptance of the 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 19 

foreign estimate upon our own writers. It 
might be denned almost as a willingness to be 
second-hand, a feeling which finds satisfaction 
in calling Irving the American Goldsmith ; 
Cooper, the American Scott ; Bryant, the 
American Wordsworth; and Whittier, the 
American Burns. Fifty years ago, when this 
silly trick was far more prevalent than it is now, 
Lowell satirized it in the i Fable for Critics ': 

Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shan- 
ties 
That has not brought forth its Miltons and Dantes ; 
I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shel- 

leys, 
Two Raphaels, six Titians (I think), one Apelles, 
Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens ; 
One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, 
A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons, 
In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons 
He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain 
Will be some very great person over again. 

And elsewhere in the same poem Lowell 
protests against the literature that 

suits each whisper and motion 
To what will be thought of it over the ocean. 

The corrective of colonialism is a manly 
self-respect, a wholesome self-reliance, a wish 



20 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

to stand firmly on our own feet, a resolve to 
survey life with our own eyes and not through 
any imported spectacles. The new world has 
already brought forth men of action — Washing- 
ton, for example, and Lincoln — worthy of com- 
parison with the best that the old world has 
enrolled on her records. Has the new world 
produced any man of letters of corresponding 
rank? Matthew Arnold thought that there 
were only five world-classics — Homer, Dante, 
Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe. This seems 
a list unduly scanted ; but it would need to be 
five times larger before it included a single 
American name. What of it? Even if the 
American poets are no one of them to be in- 
scribed among the twoscore chief singers of 
the world, they are not the less interesting to 
us Americans, not the less inspiring. When 
an English author suggested to Sainte-Beuve 
that he did not think Lamartine an important 
poet, the great French critic suavely answered, 
" He is important to us !" Without Lamar- 
tine there would be a blank in French litera- 
ture. So we Americans may see clearly the de- 
fects of Bryant and of Whittier, and yet we may 
say that they are important to us, even though 
they, like Lamartine, are not among the fore- 
most poets of their language or of their century. 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 21 

Colonialism and provincialism, although they 
seem mutually destructive, still manage some- 
how to exist side by side in our criticism to-day. 
The best cure for them is a study of the two 
other great literatures, Greek and French. Too 
much attention to contemporary British litera- 
ture is dangerous for us, since its chief character- 
istics are ours by inheritance. Matthew Arnold 
held that it was a work of supererogation for 
Carlyle to preach earnestness to the English, 
who already abounded in that sense. For us 
to follow the lead of the British in literature or 
in any other art is but saying ditto to ourselves. 
It is like the marriage of cousins — and for the 
same reasons to be deplored. But the study of 
Greek literature supplies us instantly with the 
eternal standards, the use of which cannot but 
be fatal to provincialism. And the study of 
French literature, which is as modern as our 
own and yet as different as may be in its ideals 
and its methods, is likely to serve as a certain 
antidote to colonialism. 

The study of Greek literature, the greatest 
of the literatures of the past, and the study of 
French literature, the other great literature of 
the present, will lead us towards that American 
cosmopolitanism which is the antithesis of both 
provincialism and colonialism. An American 



22 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

cosmopolitanism, I say, for I agree with Cole- 
ridge in thinking that " the cosmopolitanism 
which does not spring out of, and blossom 
upon, the deep-rooted stem of nationality or 
patriotism, is a spurious and rotten growth." 
" Stendhal," a Frenchman who did not care for 
France and who found himself, at last, a man 
without a country, had for a motto, " I come 
from Cosmopolis." A fit motto for an Ameri- 
can author might be " I go to Cosmopolis" — 
I go to see the best the world has to offer, the 
best being none too good for American use; 
I go as a visitor, and I return always a loyal 
citizen of my own country. 

As Plutarch tells us, "it is well to go for a 
light to another man's fire, but not to tarry by 
it, instead of kindling a torch of one's own." 
A torch of one's own ! — that is a possession 
worth having, whether it be a flaming beacon 
on the hill-top or a tiny taper in the window. 
We cannot tell how far a little candle throws 
its beams, nor who is laying his course by its 
flickering light. The most that we can do — 
and it is also the least that we should do — is 
to tend the flame carefully and to keep it 
steady. 

(1896.) 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 

" ONLY the literature of a country teaches us 
to understand its institutions," said one of the 
acutest of modern French critics, the late J. J. 
Weiss, in a recent volume of essays ; and he 
added, with perhaps not quite the same pro- 
portion of truth, that "to the historian, who 
grows pale over them, collections of ordinan- 
ces, codes, and constitutions yield only lifeless 
laws." That the laws afford us only the skel- 
eton of a dead and gone society we may admit ; 
and we are quick to see that it is literature 
which cases these bare bones in flesh and 
blood. Unless its literature is rooted in truth, 
a civilization may pass away and be misjudged 
— honestly misjudged, in good faith misunder- 
stood — even at the moment of its passing. 
Such, so Mr. Thomas Nelson Page declares, 
has been the fate of the Old South ; it has had 
no historian, and so it is in danger of perpet- 
ual misinterpretation; its civilization left no 
literature ; and of its laws the best known is 



26 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

the slave code. The one book which deals 
with the life of the Old South, and which has 
gone to the farthest corners of the earth, is 
the one book by which the lovers of the Old 
South do not wish to see it judged — ' Uncle 
Tom's Cabin.' The one book which was 
actually written in the South between 1825 
and 1850, and which seems to me to give the 
most accurate account of one aspect of South- 
ern civilization, is Mrs. Kemble's 'Journal of 
a Residence on a Georgia Plantation ' ; and 
that again is not a book by which the lov- 
ers of the Old South would wish to see it 
judged. 

Why was it that the Old South contributed 
so little to the literature of America? Why 
was it that before the war Mrs. E. D. E. N. 
Southworth flourished and Mrs. Caroline Lee 
Hentz ? Why is it that immediately after the 
war we had only the encyclopaedic romances 
of Mrs. Augusta J. Evans and the saccharine 
stories of ' Christian Reid,' as remote from 
reality as though they had been translated 
from the French of Georges Ohnet or from 
the German of "E. Marlitt " ? Why was it that 
Brer Rabbit, having had his misadventure with 
the Tar Baby in countless plantations through- 
out the South before the war, found no Uncle 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 27 

Remus to come forward and tell them for our 
delight until long after the war ? 

These are questions which every student of 
American literary history must put to himself 
sooner or later; and there are many other 
questions like these. For an answer one cannot 
do better than turn to two books which were 
published early in the last decade of the nine- 
teenth century — two studies of the South, by 
two representative Southern writers. One of 
these books is the biography of ' William Gil- 
more Simms,' prepared for the American Men 
of Letters Series by Professor William P. Trent ; 
and the other is Mr. Thomas Nelson Page's 
volume of essays on the ' Old South.' Both 
books are welcome ; both are candid and hon- 
est ; both are unusually well written, Professor 
Trent's having the solid framework of the 
historian, and Mr. Page's having the warm 
coloring of the poet. Both books, moreover, 
are the product of that young, hearty, loyal, 
and energetic New South, which is the best 
legacy the Old South left to the Union. Mr. 
Page, as becomes a poet, has a fondness for 
the past, while Professor Trent, as is fit in one 
who is instructing youth, has his face set res- 
olutely towards the future. 

There are yet a few Southern writers who 



28 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

turn their backs on the present and prefer to 
abide amid moribund memories. Professor 
Trent is not one of these. He is willing to let 
the dead past bury its dead. In this volume we 
find a new spirit — a spirit not frequent even 
now in works of Southern authorship. His 
book is solid in research, worthy in workman- 
ship, dignified in manner, and brave in tone ; 
it is not only a good book, it is a good deed. 
It is emphatically a proof of the existence of 
that New South which has been so loudly pro- 
claimed and so often. In telling the career of 
William Gilmore Simms, Professor Trent has 
taken occasion to sketch for us also the envi- 
ronment which made Simms what he was — 
which, indeed, kept him from being more than 
he was. Believing " that Simms was a typical 
Southerner," Professor Trent thinks that it 
would be " impossible to convey a full idea of 
his character without a constant reference to 
the history of the Southern people during the 
first seven decades of this century." As this 
history has been little studied and still less un- 
derstood, Professor Trent has been led to pre- 
sent it with a fulness of treatment which at 
first may seem disproportionate, but which at 
least has resulted in giving to his book a 
breadth and an interest not possible, if it had 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 29 

been merely the biography of William Gilmore 
Simms. The life of the author of ' Guy Riv- 
ers ' and of the 'Yemassee' is here set down 
thoroughly and once for all ; but accompany- 
ing it is a study of the literary conditions of 
the South, such as no one has ever before 
attempted. 

Only one of Mr. Page's papers is devoted 
specifically to the literature of the South, but 
scattered throughout his book are passages 
which cast a sudden and a penetrating light 
on the social conditions of the South before 
the war, and thus explain the circumstances 
and the conditions under which that literature 
was produced. Here, for example, is one pas- 
sage : " The social life formed of these ele- 
ments in combination was one of singular 
sweetness and freedom from vice. . . . They 
were a careless and pleasure - loving people ; 
but, as in most rural communities, their fes- 
tivities were free from dissipation. There was 
sometimes too great an indulgence on the part 
of young men in the State drink, the julep ; 
but whether it was that it killed early, or that 
it was usually abandoned as the responsibili- 
ties of life increased, an elderly man of dissi- 
pated habits was almost unknown. . . . The 
life was gay. In addition to the perpetual 



30 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

round of ordinary entertainment, there was 
always on hand or in prospect some more for- 
mal festivity — a club meeting, a fox-hunt, a 
party, a tournament, a wedding. Little ex- 
cuse was needed to bring them together where 
every one was social, and where the great 
honor was to be the host. Scientific horse- 
racing was confined to the regular race-tracks, 
where the races were not little dashes, but 
four-mile heats, which tested speed and bot- 
tom alike. But good blood was common, and 
a ride even with a girl in an afternoon gen- 
erally meant a dash along the level through 
the woods, where, truth to tell, she was very 
apt to win. Occasionally there was even a 
dash from the church. . . . The chief sport, 
however, was fox-hunting. It was, in season, 
almost universal. Who that lived in Old Vir- 
ginia does not remember the fox-hunts — the 
eager chase after ' grays ' or ' old reds ?' " 

This is a beautiful picture of a lovely life ; 
but such an existence was too luxurious, too 
easy-going, too enervating for the cultivation 
of letters. Literature is not an affair of slip- 
pers and arm-chair, of mint-julep and fox- 
hunt ; it is a task, a toil, unceasing and un- 
resting ; it is a labor of love, no doubt, but 
none the less a labor. Literature is like the 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 3 1 

other arts, a jealous mistress, and she refuses 
her favors to all who do not woo her with 
single-hearted devotion. This devotion litera- 
ture received from no Southerner in the old 
days except from Poe. Literature did not re- 
ceive this devotion from Simms, as Professor 
Trent makes clear to us ; and Simms was a 
man of ability who, under more favorable con- 
ditions and under a stimulus to sterner self- 
discipline, might have left a book likely to 
last. 

Of ability there was never any lack in the 
South. As Mr. Page says : " The causes of 
the absence of a Southern literature are to be 
looked for elsewhere than in intellectual indi- 
gence. The intellectual conditions were such 
as might well have created a noble literature, 
but the physical conditions were adverse to its 
production and were too potent to be over- 
come." 

And he declares that the following were the 
principal causes which deprived the South of 
literature : 

1. The people of the South were an agri- 
cultural people, widely diffused, and lacking 
the stimulus of immediate mental contact. 

2. The absence of cities, which in the his- 
tory of literary life have proved literary foci 



32 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

essential for its production, and the want of 
publishing houses at the South. 

3. The exactions of the institution of slav- 
ery, and the absorption of the intellectual 
forces of the people of the South in the solu- 
tion of the vital problems it engendered. 

4. The general ambition of the Southern 
people for political distinction, and the appli- 
cation of their literary powers to polemical 
controversy. 

5. The absence of a reading public at the 
South for American authors, due in part to 
the conservatism of the Southern people. 

That all five of these causes were potent 
there is no doubt. But I wonder how it is 
that Mr. Page did not note that four of these 
five causes are as potent now as they were be- 
fore the war. Slavery has disappeared, that 
is the only change ; the other conditions are 
much the same. And yet that the New South 
has a literature to-day she does not need to 
declare, for whoever reads our language knows 
the books of the new writers who have sprung 
up since slavery was abolished. Mark Twain 
has written about life on the Mississippi and 
Mr. Cable about the Creoles of New Orleans; 
Mr. Harris has given us Georgia sketches in 
black and white, and Mr. Page himself has 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 33 

painted the young men and maidens of Old 
Virginia; Charles Egbert Craddock has taken 
us up into the mountains of Tennessee; and 
half a score of other authors have revealed to 
us nooks of the earth and types of humanity 
hitherto unsuspected. Yet the people of the 
South are still agricultural, still ambitious of po- 
litical distinction, still without cities and with- 
out publishing houses and without a wide read- 
ing public — for these new Southern authors 
have been brought out at the North, in North- 
ern magazines, and by Northern publishers. 

This leads us to believe that of the five 
causes given by Mr. Page one was more im- 
portant than all the rest. This one was slavery. 
There was, I think, another cause not given by 
Mr. Page, but to this I shall return later. That 
slavery was at bottom really responsible for 
the Southern abstention from literature is evi- 
dent to any impartial reader of Mr. Page's 
volume and of Professor Trent's. As Mr. Page 
himself puts it, " the standard of literary work 
[in the South before the war] was not a purely 
literary standard, but one based on public 
opinion, which in its turn was founded on the 
general consensus that the existing institution 
was not to be impugned, directly or indirectly, 
on any ground or by any means whatsoever. 



34 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

This was an atmosphere in which literature 
could not flourish. In consequence, where lit- 
erature was indulged in, it was in a half -apol- 
ogetic way, as if it were not altogether com- 
patible with the social dignity of the author. 
Thought which in its expression has any other 
standard than fidelity to truth, whatever sec- 
ondary value it may have, cannot possess 
much value as literature." And Professor 
Trent again and again makes the same dec- 
laration, telling us that " a Southerner had to 
think in certain grooves." 

Professor Trent also makes clear to us the 
little-understood fact that the Southerners " re- 
tained a large element of the feudal notion." 
So we see that " slavery helped feudalism, and 
feudalism helped slavery." " If feudal England 
was merry England," says Professor Trent in a 
passage I cannot forbear to quote, "the feudal 
South was the merry and sunny South; nay, 
more, it was ' a nation of men of honor and of 
cavaliers.' The South was never barbarous, for 
it possessed a picturesque civilization marked 
by charm of mind and manners both in men 
and women. But the South had forgotten 
that, in the words of Burke, ' the age of chiv- 
alry is gone.' It ignored the fact that while 
chivalry was a good thing in its day, modern 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 35 

civilization is a much higher thing. Even 
now many otherwise well informed gentlemen 
do not understand the full meaning of the 
expression ' Southern chivalry/ which they 
use so often. They know that it stands for 
many bright and high things, but they seem 
to forget its darker meaning. They forget 
that it means that the people of the South 
were leading a primitive life — a life behind 
the age. They forget that it means that 
Southerners were conservative, slow to change, 
contented with the social distinctions already 
existing. They forget all this, but the expres- 
sion has meanings which probably were never 
known to them. It means that Southerners 
lived a life which, though simple and pictu- 
resque, was nevertheless calculated to repress 
many of the best faculties and powers of our 
nature. It was a life affording few opportunities 
to talents that did not lie in certain beaten 
grooves. It was a life gaining its intellectual 
nourishment, just as it did its material com- 
forts, largely from abroad — a life that choked 
all thought and investigation that did not tend 
to conserve existing institutions and opinions— 
a life that rendered originality scarcely possible 
except under the guise of eccentricity." 

In considering the Southern attitude towards 



36 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

slavery, both Mr. Page and Professor Trent 
point out the fact that the Southern feeling 
against slavery was growing at the time of 
the Revolution. That it suddenly changed 
was due probably as much to the invention 
of the cotton-gin as to anything else. If 
that Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, had 
not whittled out his machine, slavery would 
perhaps have disappeared as peaceably from 
Virginia and North Carolina and Georgia as it 
had done from New York and New Jersey and 
Pennsylvania. But Eli Whitney did invent 
the gin which made cotton king, and the neces- 
sity for slave labor became at once apparent. 
And at this juncture, when slavery was sharply 
changed from a disappearing evil to a sacred 
institution, feudalism was also resuscitated by 
the vogue of the Waverley novels. 

There is in Mark Twain's book on the Mis- 
sissippi a strong statement of the evil wrought 
in the South by Sir Walter Scott's stories. 
After remarking that the French revolution 
and its product, Napoleon, did much harm — 
but they did also this good, they broke up the 
feudal system, root and branch — he arraigns 
the author of 'Ivanhoe' in this wise: "Then 
comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, 
and by his single might checks this wave of 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 37 

progress and even turns it back; sets the 
world in love with dreams and phantoms; 
with decayed and swinish forms of religion; 
with decayed and degraded systems of govern- 
ment; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, 
sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chival- 
ries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished 
society. He did measureless harm — more real 
and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other in- 
dividual that ever wrote. Most of the world 
has now outlived good part of these harms, 
though by no means all of them; but in our 
South they nourish pretty forcefully still. Not 
so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, 
but still forcefully. There, the genuine and 
wholesome civilization of the nineteenth cen- 
tury is curiously confused and commingled 
with the Walter Scott middle-age sham civil- 
ization, and so you have practical common 
sense, progressive ideas and progressive works 
mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, 
and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past 
that is dead, and out of charity ought to be 
buried. . , . Enough is laid on slavery, with- 
out fathering upon it these creations and con- 
tributions of Sir Walter." 

Slavery and feudalism, either of them, would 
make literature difficult ; both of them together 



38 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

made it impossible. And lack of independence 
of thought combined with the fascination of 
the pseudo-chivalric to encourage the accept- 
ance of foreign standards in literature; to keep 
the Southern people, in fact, in an attitude of 
colonial dependence to Great Britain at the 
very time that the North was developing 
authors of its own. Cooper to-day keeps his 
place close at the heels of Scott, while Simms 
is fading into oblivion as fast as G. P. R. James, 
with whose work his may fairly be compared, 
although Simms was probably far richer in 
native gifts. 

Now slavery is dead and feudalism has 
departed, and with them is disappearing the 
pseudo-chivalry which made the books of the 
Southland ridiculous. Though oratory still 
survives in the South, and though he who 
" orates " is often tempted into perfervid 
rhetoric, there are now not wanting writers 
who take their stand on the solid realities of 
life. The new authors of the New South are 
not now making second-hand imitations of 
foreign romance. They have come to the 
knowledge of the great discovery that litera- 
ture consists not so much in the mere making 
up of stories as in the frank telling of the truth. 
With the abolition of slavery came the freedom 



TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH . 39 

to speak the truth, with an eye single to nature, 
without any squint around the corner to be 
sure that the truth might not perhaps interfere 
somewhere with the peculiar institution. With 
the departure of feudal ideals came the ability 
to see that life as it is — the every-day existence 
of the plain people — is the stuff of which litera- 
ture is made. Nowadays any one who chooses 
to read any American magazine can assure 
himself that the writers of the South have 
laid firm hold of the "principle of literary art," 
to quote Professor Trent, " which requires that 
a man should write spontaneously and simply 
about those things he is fullest of and best 
understands." 
(1892.) 



THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 



THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 

When the time came for the people of the 
thirteen united colonies to proclaim to the 
world that they were free, and that they held 
themselves absolved from all allegiance to the 
British crown, and that all political connection 
between them and Great Britain was totally 
dissolved, a committee of the Continental Con- 
gress was appointed to draw up a declaration 
of independence. The members of this com- 
mittee were Benjamin Franklin, of Pennsyl- 
vania; John Adams, of Massachusetts; Roger 
Sherman, of Connecticut ; Robert R. Living- 
ston, of New York, and Thomas Jefferson, of 
Virginia. Why was it that their colleagues 
committed the writing of the Declaration of 
Independence to Thomas Jefferson, and not 
to Benjamin Franklin ? The Virginian was 
not the most prominent man even of his own 
section, and although his reputation could not 
fairly be termed local, it was but little more, 
while the name of the Pennsylvanian was well 



44 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

known throughout the whole civilized world. 
Franklin was not only the foremost citizen of 
Philadelphia, where the Congress was sitting, 
he was the most experienced publicist and the 
most accomplished man of letters in all the 
thirteen colonies ; and he was especially well 
equipped for the drawing up of an appeal to 
Europe, as he had but just returned from Lon- 
don, where he had been pleading the cause of 
his countrymen with indomitable courage and 
indisputable skill. Yet Franklin was not asked 
to write the Declaration of Independence; and 
although he and Adams made a few verbal 
amendments, the credit of that great state 
paper belongs to Jefferson. And why was it 
that this responsibility was placed on Jeffer- 
son and not on Franklin ? 

I think the explanation lies in the fact that 
Franklin was a humorist. Not only was Frank- 
lin's sturdy common-sense felt to be too plain 
a homespun for wear in the courts of Europe 
when the thought needed to be attired in all 
the lofty rhetoric that the most fervid enthu- 
siasm could produce, but also, I fear me great- 
ly, his colleagues were afraid that Franklin 
would have his joke. It would be a good 
joke, no doubt — probably a very good joke ; 
but the very best of jokes would not be in 



THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 45 

keeping with the stately occasion. They were 
acute, those leaders of the Continental Con- 
gress, and they knew that every man has the 
defects of his qualities, and that a humorist is 
likely to be lacking in reverence, and that the 
writer of the Declaration of Independence had 
a theme which demanded the most reverential 
treatment. 

So it was that Benjamin Franklin had to 
pay the penalty of humor in the last century, 
just as Abraham Lincoln had to pay it in this 
century. Because Lincoln was swift to seize 
upon an incongruity, and because he sought 
relief for his abiding melancholy in playful- 
ness, there were not a few who refused to take 
him seriously. Even after his death there 
were honest folk who held the shrewdest and 
loftiest of our statesmen to have been little 
better than a buffoon. Of the three greatest 
Americans, Franklin, Washington, and Lin- 
coln, two were humorists ; and it is perhaps 
his deficiency of humor which makes Wash- 
ington seem more remote from us and less 
friendly than either of the others. 

" Never dare to be as funny as you can," is 
probably a good motto for all men in public life. 
No doubt the British statesman who was born 
in the same year as Lincoln has found his de- 



46 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

ficiency in humor an absolute advantage to 
him ; and no doubt a potent factor of Mr. 
Gladstone's success has been his inability to 
discover anything absurd in the solemn refu- 
tation of a novel like ' Robert Elsmere' by the 
Prime-Minister who rules the mighty British 
Empire. Of course it was not merely because 
they were wits that Canning and Beaconsfield 
were distrusted ; but beyond all question their 
ability to barb an epigram made it harder for 
them to keep their hold on their party. If 
they had been as impervious to a joke as Mr. 
Gladstone is, Canning and Disraeli would have 
found it much easier to wring from the British 
public due appreciation of their political sagac- 
ity. Like all other luxuries, the perpetration 
of an epigram has to be paid for. 

Ample as the English vocabulary is to-day, 
since it has been enriched with the spoils of 
every other speech, and opulent as it is in 
semi-synonyms for the expression of delicate 
shades of difference in meaning, it is some- 
times strangely deficient in needful terms, and 
often we find ourselves sorely at a loss for a 
word to indicate a necessary distinction. Thus 
it is that we have nothing but the inadequate 
phrase sense of humor to denominate a quality 
which is often carelessly confounded with hu~ 



THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 47 

mor itself, and which should always be sharp- 
ly discriminated from it. Humor is positive, 
while the sense-of-humor is negative. A man 
with humor may make a joke, and a man with 
the sense-of-humor may take one. Neither 
includes the other; for a man able to make 
a joke may be incapable of taking one. 
From an inadequate sense-of-humor many a 
humorist is guilty of taking himself too se- 
riously. 

Carlyle, for instance, had humor, and not 
the sense-of-humor. Mr. John Morley has 
called Carlyle a "great transcendental humor- 
ist," and a great humorist Carlyle was, even if 
he were great in no other way ; but Carlyle was 
so devoid of the sense-of-humor that he seems 
never to have suspected how comic a spectacle 
he presented vehemently preaching the virtue 
of silence in not less than forty successive vol- 
umes. Dickens also was a humorist and noth- 
ing else; but Dickens took himself so seriously 
that he broke with Punch because that journal 
refused to publish his account of his quarrel 
with the wife he had promised to love, cherish, 
and protect. Probably, also, if the sense-of- 
humor had been more acutely developed in 
Dickens he would have spared us the blank- 
verse pathos of his dying children; he might 



48 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

even have refrained from out-heroding Herod 
in his massacre of the innocents. 

These two qualities, humor and the sense-of- 
humor, seem to me to be wholly distinct, and it 
is really a misfortune that the terms for differen- 
tiating them are so unsatisfactory. If we had 
sharply contrasting words for the positive hu- 
mor, which is creative, and for the negative hu- 
mor, which is mainly critical, we should not 
be forced to the paradoxical declaration that 
humorists have often no sense-of-humor. A 
friend of mine now makes it a rule never to 
risk a gibe with funny men, because he had 
twice ventured to crack a joke with accredited 
wits, and they both failed to take it, turning 
the merry jest into a serious matter. Of the 
two qualities, therefore, the sense-of-humor is 
the more highly to be prized. It is an invalu- 
able possession, adding an unfailing savor to 
the enjoyment of life ; and any woman who 
may chance to be endowed with it is always 
company for herself. It is so good a thing 
that one can hardly have too much of it, al- 
though an ardent reformer might find that an 
excess of it chilled the heat of his resolution. 

As it is an advantage of the sense-of-humor 
that it prevents you from taking yourself too 
seriously, so it is a disadvantage of humor itself 



THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 49 

that it prevents others from taking you seri- 
ously. And there is the danger, also, that 
those who possess humor are sometimes pos- 
sessed by it. They may thus be led to the 
perpetration of incongruities they would be 
the swiftest to perceive in another. Lowell 
was a poet and a humorist ; but the poet wrote 
the lofty poem the ' Cathedral ' ; the humor- 
ist was responsible for the jarring note when 
one of the two Englishmen met beneath the 
shadow of the church at Chartres took the 
American for a Frenchman : 

1 Esker vous ate a nabitang ?' he asked. 
'I never ate one; are they good?' asked I. 

In the ' Biglow Papers ' the poet and the hu- 
morist were one being, not two separate entities, 
and the result of the fusion is the finest satire in 
our language since the ' Hudibras ' of the But- 
ler whose wit Lowell abundantly appreciated. 
But even the author of the ' Biglow Papers ' 
had to pay the penalty of humor. Because 
the Yankee dialect of Hosea was phonetically 
represented with artistic feeling and scientific 
precision, the British pirates lying in wait for 
books of "American humor" published the 
1 Biglow Papers ' as though it was a fit com- 



50 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

panion for the misspelt writings of Artemus 
Ward. It is a fact that before he was ap- 
pointed minister of the United States at the 
Court of St. James, Lowell was known to the 
British not as the poet, the scholar, the critic, 
but rather as the rival of Josh Billings. If he 
had not been a humorist, Lowell might have 
been wholly unknown to the readers of Great 
Britain ; and perhaps this would have been 
better than to be greeted as an emulator of 
those purveyors of " comic copy " who kept a 
misfit orthography as the leading article of 
their stock in trade. 

And yet why should we think the less of a 
poet for that he has made us laugh? As Low- 
ell himself has said : " Let us not be ashamed 
to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, 
we take the profoundest satisfaction in the 
farce. It is a mark of sanity." But if this 
confession were the only mark of sanity, how 
few of us could get a clean bill of health ! We 
are ashamed of our laughter; often we think 
it a thing to be apologized for. Nor do we 
thank the author of the farce for the profound 
satisfaction we take in it ; and appreciation of 
the broad fun of farce is more often than not 
semi-contemptuous, as though it were an easy 
matter to make people laugh. It is, indeed, 



THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 5 1 

as easy to make them laugh as to make them 
weep, and no easier. Heine protested against 
our praising the tragic poet for his faculty of 
drawing tears — " a talent which he has in com- 
mon with the meanest onion." 

In the theatre farce is looked down on even by 
those who prefer it. Yet farce is a legitimate 
form of the drama of the most honorable an- 
tiquity. It is a form of the drama in which 
Aristophanes and Plautus delighted, in which 
Shakespeare and Moliere wrote masterpieces, 
in which Goldsmith and Sheridan excelled, in 
which Regnard and Labiche revelled. It is 
a form of the drama having not only the high 
authority of these great names, but having also 
at all times enjoyed the widest popularity with 
the broad body of play-goers. But the broad 
body of play-goers are ashamed to confess the 
profound satisfaction they take in it ; they be- 
grudge the comic dramatist the double reward 
of praise and laughter ; and thus they make him 
pay the penalty of humor. 

It would be easier to understand this semi- 
contemptuous attitude if it were shown towards 
the mere clowns only. Grinning through a 
horse-collar is not the most exalted way of earn- 
ing a living — although there are worse. But 
the same treatment is bestowed also towards 



52 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

those in whose works humor is only the out- 
ward expression of serious thought. Because 
the ' Fable for Critics' was full of fun, many 
readers in 1849 did not discover that it was the 
acutest criticism to which our young American 
literature had until then been subjected. Per- 
haps no mask is more difficult to penetrate than 
the jester's, and no disguise is more effective 
than the cloak of humor. Just as Shylock was 
long acted as a comic part, so ' Don Quixote ' was 
long accepted as a jest-book ; and no part of 
Mr. Ormsby's introduction to his spirited trans- 
lation of the masterpiece of Cervantes is more 
illuminative than the pages in which he sketch- 
es for us the successive stages of the discovery 
that ' Don Quixote,' so far from being a mere 
piece of fooling, is really one of the wisest books 
of the world. In like manner his boisterous out- 
bursts of gigantic fun, always extravagant and 
exaggerated, often tasteless and obscene, veil 
the knowledge and the wisdom of Rabelais. 

It is not easy to suggest a philosophical ex- 
planation for the kindly condescension which 
the world is wont to bestow on the humorist. 
The condescension is kindly, even if it be semi- 
contemptuous, and there is no suggestion of an- 
imosity in it. Humor evokes little or none of 
the hatred that wit so often arouses. And there 



THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 53 

is a kind of wit of which it is well to be dis- 
trustful, for it is dangerous. This is the scoffing, 
girding wit which, to use George Eliot's phrase, 
debases the moral currency. The persiflage of 
Voltaire was often inspired by honest convic- 
tions ; but there are writers on the newspapers 
of New York who have cultivated a wit not un- 
like Voltaire's, but with even less of sincerity 
in it, soiling whatever it touches — corroding 
and disintegrating. 

There is no affinity between this sharp and 
envenomed wit and true humor — sometimes 
broad, perhaps, but always cheerful and hearty, 
wholesome and antiseptic. Nor is the doubt 
awakened by the bitter wit the cause of the pub- 
lic attitude towards the joyous humorist. For 
that we must seek deeper. Having no desire 
to lose myself in the mists of metaphysics, it is 
perhaps sufficient now to suggest that we seem 
to have an intuitive feeling that laughter is less 
elevating than weeping. Mr. Lecky thinks that 
a man of cheerful disposition, having enjoyed 
a tragedy and a farce, will admit that the plea- 
sure derived from the former is of a higher or- 
der than that derived from the latter, and there- 
fore, although mere enjoyment might lead him 
to the farce, a sense of its nobler character in- 
clines him to the tragedy. 



54 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

In other words, we intuitively feel a master- 
piece of tragedy to be superior to the master- 
piece of farce ; we admit it to be higher in kind. 
From this intuitive belief may be deduced the 
reason why our attitude towards humor is semi- 
contemptuous. It is the reason for this intui- 
tive belief that it would be interesting to have 
elucidated. Why does a laugh strike many of 
us as a thing unseemly in itself, and therefore 
to be apologized for? Admitting with Mr. 
Lecky that most of us feel that humor is in- 
ferior to pathos, that the tear is superior to the 
smile, what is the basis of this feeling ? what is 
its scientific foundation ? 

Whatever its cause, this feeling is as potent 
to-day in the United States as it was in France 
in the days of Rabelais, or in Spain in the days 
of Cervantes. And the very strangest of its 
effects now, as then, is that it blinds us to the 
other merits of a writer who may amuse us. 
Though we enjoy the fun he gives us, we set 
him down as a fun-maker only ; and when a 
man makes us laugh abundantly we refuse to 
look into his writings to see if they do not con- 
tain more than mere mirth. There is no more 
striking example of this injustice than one now 
before our eyes. 

We have to-day here in the United States as 



THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 55 

a contemporary a great humorist, who is also 
one of the masters of English prose. He is 
one of the foremost story-tellers of the world, 
with the gift of swift narrative, with the certain 
grasp of human nature, with a rare power of pre- 
senting character at a passionate crisis. There 
is not in the fiction of our language and of our 
country anything finer of its kind than any one 
of half a dozen chapters in ' Tom Sawyer,' in 
' Huckleberry Finn,' in 'Pudd'nhead Wilson.' 

Partly because his fiction is uneven, and is 
never long sustained at its highest level of ex- 
cellence, partly because he has also written too 
much that is little better than burlesque and 
extravaganza, but chiefly because he is primari- 
ly a humorist, because he is free from cant and 
sham pathos, because he does not take himself 
too seriously, because his humor is free, flowing, 
unfailing, because his laughter is robust and con- 
tagious and irresistible, because he has made 
more of our scattered English-speaking people 
laugh than any other man of our time — because 
of all these things we do not see that in all fic- 
tion, since the single footprint on the shore fell 
under the eyes of the frightened Crusoe, there is 
no more thrilling moment than that when the 
hand of Indian Joe (his one enemy) comes slow- 
ly within the vision of Tom Sawyer, lost in the 



56 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

cave ; we do not see that no one of our Amer- 
ican novelists has ever shown more insight into 
the springs of human action or more dramatic 
force than is revealed in Huck Finn's account 
of the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud, and of 
the attempt to lynch Colonel Sherburn ; we do 
not see that it would be hard to select from all 
the story-tellers of the nineteenth century a 
scene of immeasurable pathos surpassing that 
in ' Pudd'nhead Wilson ' when the wretched 
Chambers knowingly sells his own mother 
" down the river." 

When we find that the man who wrote these 
chapters, and so many more only a little less 
marvellous in their vigor and their truth, is set 
down in most accounts of American literature 
as a funny man only, when we see him dis- 
missed with a line or two of patronizing com- 
ment, as though Mark Twain were only a news- 
paper humorist, a chance rival of John Phoenix 
or Artemus Ward or Orpheus C. Kerr as a ven- 
der of comic copy, then we have it brought 
home to us that humor is a possession for which 
the possessor must meet the bill. Mr. Clem- 
ens, having more humor than any one else of 
his generation, has had to pay a higher price. 

(1894.) 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 

Two lines of the prologue for the opening 
of Drury Lane Theatre, which Dr. Johnson 
wrote to be spoken by his former pupil, David 
Garrick, still linger on our lips as a familiar 
quotation : 

The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, 
And we that live to please must please to live. 

This pair of rymes is characterized by the 
robust common -sense which at once limits 
Johnson's criticism and gives it its chief value. 
Common-sense kept the man who could thus 
compact a simple truth into a striking couplet 
from giving to his assertion an extension not 
warranted by his own long-continued observa- 
tion of the methods and the motives of men 
of letters. An absence of this caution has led 
later writers to ascribe the broad success of 
this or that author to the skill with which this 
or that author has gauged the popular taste at 
the moment of publication, artfully preparing 



60 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

his literary wares to meet a widespread de- 
mand which he has shrewdly foreseen. 

This is a most unsatisfactory and a most un- 
scientific attempt to explain away what seems 
often inexplicable — the interest sometimes 
shown by the book-buying public in the writ- 
ings of an author whose works are not es- 
teemed by his fellow-craftsmen. As it is hard 
to prove a negative I will not maintain that no 
author has ever been clear-sighted enough to 
guess at the probable duration of the next 
swing of the pendulum ; but I am certain that 
the lucky hits of this sort must be very far be- 
tween, and that any author who should rely 
mainly on his ability to guess at the kind of 
book the public was going to thirst after six 
months or a year later would be very likely to 
go hungry himself. 

And I venture to believe also that there is a 
fallacy concealed in the phrase which speaks 
of " the taste of the public," for it assumes 
that there is a public, — one public having a 
taste in common with all its members. I am 
inclined to think that, so far from there being 
only one public, the number of publics having 
widely divergent likes and dislikes is indefinite, 
not to say infinite. These smaller publics are 
no two of them of the same size; and no 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 6 1 

doubt the membership of some of them is too 
limited for an author to hope to make his liv- 
ing by pleasing it. There are in fact as many 
different publics as there are separate authors ; 
and there must be, since no two writers ever 
made precisely the same appeal to their read- 
ers. No two leaders in literature ever had ex- 
actly the same set of followers. The admirers 
of Byron when he burst forth first had been 
many of them the admirers of Scott ; but the 
two circles have not the same radius ; and 
they are intersecting and not concentric. 

The broad reading public, to which a pop- 
ular author is supposed to address himself, is 
really rent in twain by the differences of its dis- 
putes over literary principles. Just as a man 
must take either the Hebraic view of life or the 
Hellenic, to use the distinction that Matthew 
Arnold borrowed from Heine, just as he must 
be either an Aristotelian or a Platonist, whether 
he knows it or not, so he is also (perhaps from 
inquiry and conviction, but more probably 
from native temperament) either an Ancient 
or a Modern, either a Classicist or a Roman- 
ticist, either an Idealist or a Realist. The 
standards are opposed and the conflict is irre- 
pressible. Whoever enlists under one of these 
banners is ready with the torch to torture 



62 ASrECTS OF FICTION 

those who volunteer to uphold the other. The 
very acrimony of these discussions is all the 
evidence any one can demand before being as- 
sured that the public is not one, single, and in- 
divisible. 

The public is really but a congeries of war- 
ring factions ; and sometimes these factions are 
representative of the degree of development 
to which those who compose it have attained. 
Each, as it rises a step higher in the scale of 
civilization, naturally despises that which re- 
mains below on the plane it has just aban- 
doned, and it is in turn detested by that over 
which it boasts its new superiority. Probably 
a similar state of affairs is visible wherever 
there is progress ; those who are going to the 
front looking back with contempt on those 
who linger in the rear — a contempt which is 
repaid with frank and justifiable hatred. Per- 
haps as apt an illustration of this as any now 
available may be found in the present state of 
affairs existing among the vast body of men 
and women who are fond of the game of 
whist. 

In Dr. Pole's calm and scientific discussion 
of the ' Evolution of Whist, a Study of the Pro- 
gressive Changes which the Game has passed 
through from its Origin to the Present Time,' 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 63 

we are told that the development of whist has 
had four periods. In the first of these the 
player relied chiefly on his master- cards and 
his trumps, following suit with any one of his 
low cards ; and this Dr. Pole calls the Primi- 
tive Game. In the second stage the game was 
raised into a really intellectual pastime by 
Hoyle and his followers, and long whist gave 
way before short whist. The Game of Hoyle 
was the basis of the development taking place 
during the third period, during which there 
was evolved the Philosophical Game, indisso- 
lubly connected with the names of Clay and 
* Cavendish.' The fourth period is that of 
the Latterday Improvements, in which the 
American Leads have been adopted with other 
concomitant devices of like delicacy and sub- 
tlety. 

As it happens there is a department of lit- 
erature in which the development is singularly 
similar to the evolution of whist, and in which 
we can also declare four chronological periods, 
the one following the other and flowering from 
it. This is the art of fiction. In the begin- 
ning fiction dealt with the Impossible — with 
wonders, with mysteries, with the supernatu- 
ral; and these are the staple of the ' Arabian 
Nights,' of Greek romances like the ' Golden 



64 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Ass,' and of the tales of chivalry like ' Amadis 
of Gaul.' In the second stage the merely Im- 
probable was substituted for the frankly Impos- 
sible ; and the hero went through adventures 
in kind such as might befall anybody, but in 
quantity far more than are likely to happen to 
any single man, unless his name were Gil Bias 
or Quentin Durward, Natty Bumppo or d'Ar- 
tagnan. Then in the course of years the Im- 
probable was superseded by the Probable ; and 
it is by their adroit presentation of the Proba- 
ble that Balzac and Thackeray hold their high 
places in the history of the art. But the craft 
of the novelist did not come to its climax with 
the masterpieces of Balzac and of Thackeray ; 
its development continued perforce, and there 
arose story-tellers who preferred to deal rather 
with the Inevitable than with the Probable 
only. Of this fourth stage of the evolution of 
fiction perhaps the most salient examples are 
the ' Scarlet Letter ' of Hawthorne and the 
* Romola ' of George Eliot, the ' Smoke ' of 
Turgeneff and the ' Anna Karenina ' of Tolstoi. 
The four stages of whist are thus shown to 
have each its parallel in the four stages of fic- 
tion.* The Primitive Game of Dr. Pole is not 

* One of the editors of the Chicago Dial has sug- 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 65 

simpler or more rudimentary than the tale of 
the Impossible. The Game of Hoyle is close- 
ly akin to the story of the Improbable. The 
Philosophical Game can be matched fitly with 
the novel of the Probable. The Latter day Im- 
provements of Dr. Pole have a rigorous logic 
which assimilates them to the most modern 
form of fiction in which the Inevitable deduc- 
tions are made from the characters presented. 
" We have noticed four steps or stages mark- 
ing the progress, and producing four varieties 
of game, all really whist, but whist in differ- 
ent stages of development," says Dr. Pole, and 
his words can be applied absolutely to the 
four varieties of fiction also. " The later forms 
have, indeed, grown out of the earlier ones, 
but have not necessarily extinguished or abol- 
ished them" — and this is true of fiction too. 
"The admirers of any late step are perfectly 
justified in showing its superiority to the one 
before it, but there is room enough in the 
world for both to continue to exist side by 
side"; and it is from this lofty attitude of 
broad toleration thus recommended by Dr. 

gested that mention should here be made of the fact 
that " there is, and has always been, a fifth kind of 
fiction, corresponding to the variety of whist known 
as Bumblepuppy." 
5 



66 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Pole that certain American critics have de- 
parted when they commented harshly on the 
amazing predilection certain British critics had 
declared for the more primitive forms of fiction. 
The novel-readers who prefer tales of the Im- 
possible or of the Improbable resemble the 
whist-players who prefer the Primitive Game, 
which, so Dr. Pole informs us, is still " played 
by enormous numbers of domestic players, who 
find incidents enough in it to amuse them for 
hours together. And though many of them 
would doubtless be able to learn and to enjoy 
a more intellectual form, there is no reason 
why it should be thrust upon them, or why 
they should be calumniated for adhering to 
their innocent form of entertainment. It is 
probable that they follow fairly the general 
mode of play in the infancy of the game." 

We all see that it was in the infancy of fic- 
tion that it dealt with the Impossible and in 
its boyhood that it began to attempt the Im- 
probable. Although the liking for the Impos- 
sible still survives among children, and is likely 
to survive among them always, I am inclined 
to think that it is almost dead among men 
and women who have attained their majority. 
The bulk of the novel-readers of this last dec- 
ade of the nineteenth century are either in the 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 67 

second stage of development or in the third ; 
they have been weaned by the exploiting of 
the Impossible, but they are not yet ready to 
enjoy the discussion of the Inevitable ; and 
they do not care much whether the incidents 
of the stories they lounge through negligently 
are doubtfully Improbable or actually Proba- 
ble. But there is a certain portion of the 
public which takes its fiction seriously, which 
respects the art of narrative, which sees the 
possibilities now open before the novelist, and 
which holds the story-teller up to the highest 
standard. This portion of the public — wel- 
coming warmly the fiction which gives the 
most truthful interpretation of life — is steadily 
gaining in numbers and in influence. 

I fear that its swifter increase is not a little 
retarded by its own intolerance towards the 
novel-readers who yet delight in the Primitive 
Game. This attitude is easy to understand, 
but none the less is it unfortunate. " We may 
take it for granted that, whatever may be the 
exclusive notions of the select whist aristoc- 
racy, there will always be a large democratic 
body who will please themselves as to what 
sort of game they will play," says Dr. Pole, 
very pertinently. " The amiable lady who be- 
gins by playing out her aces, or the pleasant 



68 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

club-member who leads his lowest card from 
five, ought not to be upbraided for bad play. 
All that should be said is that they play vari- 
eties of the game differing from that recom- 
mended in 'Cavendish's' latest edition." In 
like manner the late Professor Boyesen should 
not have berated Mr. Andrew Lang for pre- 
ferring Mr. Haggard's gory romances to Tol- 
stoi's more serious discussions of human expe- 
rience. The American critic should have con- 
tented himself with pointing out that his Brit- 
ish colleague liked the Primitive Game better 
than the Latterday Improvements. And really 
it was unreasonable in Professor Boyesen to 
expect that Mr. Lang should appreciate the 
new American Leads, either in literature or in 
life. 

Any movement forward by the more intelli- 
gent is like the sending ahead of skirmishers, 
and we have no right to expect to find the 
main body of the army close at the heels of 
the advance-guard. The most we can hope 
is that the ground taken by the few pio- 
neers yesterday shall be held in force to-day. 
Generally any improvement in taste makes its 
way slowly, and the bulk of the public must 
always lag long behind the keener intellects 
that delight to spy out a new land for them- 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 69 

selves. In New York City, for instance, the 
last thirty years have seen a most extraordi- 
nary increase in the popular appreciation of 
music. 

Toward the end of the sixties Mr. Theodore 
Thomas and his orchestra played every sum- 
mer night in the old Central Park Garden, 
and the programme was made up largely of 
medleys from Offenbach's operettas and of 
dance-music. Owing to Mr. Thomas's increas- 
ing efforts to give better and better music as 
he educated the New York concert-goer, and 
owing also to the labors of Dr. Damrosch and 
Mr. Seidl, there is now perhaps no city in the 
world where more music of the highest class 
is heard in the course of the year than in New 
York, and none where it is more delicately en- 
joyed. The finest of Wagner's music-dramas 
are not now too solid fare for the subscribers 
of the Metropolitan Opera-house, who no 
longer find any satisfaction even in the most 
expensive performance of sugary trifles like 
the ' Lucia' of Donizetti. 

But though the subscribers of the Metro- 
politan Opera-house have lost their liking for 
'Traviata' and for ' Trovatore,' the occasional 
experiments of other opera companies in other 
New York theatres and in opera-houses in 



70 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

other cities of the Union seem to show that 
there are perhaps as many music-lovers as 
ever who have advanced just far enough to 
understand and enjoy these simple favorites 
of former days. The opera-goers of this class 
are like the whist-players who stick to the 
Primitive Game, or the novel-readers who revel 
in romances of the Improbable. And I have 
no doubt that if a young conductor possess- 
ing such shrewdness and force as Mr. Thomas 
revealed, should give summer-night concerts 
in New York, placing on his programme dance- 
tunes and medleys from operettas, he would 
have now quite as large a following as Mr. 
Thomas had thirty years ago ; and in time he 
could slowly lead on this portion of the public 
to the acceptance of music demanding a more 
careful appreciation. 

There is ready at hand yet another example 
of the ease with which a portion of the public 
can be educated to have a relish for the finer 
forms of art. It was in the sixties that Mr. 
Theodore Thomas began his elevating work 
here in New York; and it was in the seventies 
that the American magazines began to seek 
for a fresher and a richer pictorial embellish- 
ment, a search which slowly brought into ex- 
istence the illustrated monthly due to the lov- 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 7 1 

ing co-operation of the editor, the artist, the 
engraver, and the printer. The best of these 
sumptuous publications, having gradually cre- 
ated the taste by which they were estimated, 
attained to an enormous circulation — a fact 
which might seem to prove them to be pre- 
cisely " the kind of periodical that the public 
wants." 

Yet early in the nineties we saw the appear- 
ance of a swarm of cheaper monthlies, filled 
with process -blocks from photographs; and 
some of these slight magazines also attained 
to an enormous circulation. But as the suc- 
cess of these new periodicals affected only a 
little (if at all) the sale of the older and solider 
magazines, it is obvious that " the kind of 
periodical that the public wants " is a question 
to which there are now two answers. In other 
words, while one segment of the reading circle 
has been led to develop a liking for the more 
substantial merits of the established maga- 
zines, another segment is attracted by the 
cheap tawdriness of the more flimsy novelties. 
And it is quite within the bounds of possibil- 
ity that an inventive editor might now devise 
a third form of periodical which should also 
attain to an enormous circulation without 
interfering with the profits of either class of 



72 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

monthly now most in favor ; he would only 
be proving the existence of a third segment 
of the reading circle. 

So I return to the assertion made in an 
early paragraph of this essay : there is really 
no such entity as the public. There is a pub- 
lic ready to welcome everything which is good 
in its kind ; and there are as many publics as 
there are different kinds of good things. Few 
of us are so limited in our likings as to belong 
to one public only. The extreme Wagnerite 
is often warmest in praise of a captivating 
waltz by Strauss ; and the extreme veritist can 
acknowledge the charm of a romantic fantasy 
of Stevenson's. Perhaps a reader of extraor- 
dinary catholicity might belong almost to all 
the different publics. 

Some of these publics are very large indeed 
and some of them are very small. ' Hamlet/ 
for example, appeals to almost every type of 
play-goer, while the performance of Ibsen's 
* Ghosts ' pleases only a chosen few. In gen- 
eral, of course, the higher up the pyramid is 
cut, the smaller will be the area of the cross- 
section — ' Hamlet ' being one of the rare works 
which are so nearly universal as rather to bi- 
sect the pyramid than to cut across it. When 
one has once grasped firmly the idea that the 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 73 

people at large are massed in a pyramid, one 
layer above the other, with the most intelli- 
gent at the apex, one cannot but see the futil- 
ity of all assertions that " the public wants to 
be amused," and " the public wants sensation 
and excitement," and "the public does not 
want analysis and disquisition." There is a 
public that wants to be amused ; and perhaps 
the larger portion of this public wants sensa- 
tion and excitement, and does not want anal- 
ysis and disquisition. But there is a public 
also which does want analysis and disquisition, 
and does not want sensation and excitement. 
There is a segment of the reading circle with 
the keenest relish for airy fantasy and for deli- 
cate humor. There is another segment hungry 
for the naked truth. There is yet another 
which has no real liking for knowledge of it- 
self, and which therefore likes to hear over 
and over again the old outworn tales and to 
listen again and again to old outworn rymes 
of love and dove, of heart and part. 

This diversity of public taste has always ex- 
isted — except perhaps in the compact com- 
munity of Athens. In the prologue he wrote 
for the third performance of one of his come- 
dies, Terence denounced the foolish public be- 
cause at the first performance it was all excite- 



74 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

ment over an exhibition on the tight -rope 
which was to follow, and because at the second 
performance the theatre emptied itself sudden- 
ly in the middle of the play when a rumor 
ran around the house that there were going to 
be gladiators elsewhere in the neighborhood. 
(If I may open a parenthesis here, I should 
like to drop the query as to whether Gresham's 
Law may not be as potent in art as it is in 
finance, the inferior product driving out the 
superior, as the bloody shows of the arena in 
Rome finally extinguished the Latin literary 
drama.) In England, under Elizabeth, the 
wooden theatres in which Shakespeare's sub- 
limest tragedies were acted served on other 
days of the week as a ring for the sport of 
bear-baiting. In the early part of the nine- 
teenth century in London, when Sarah Sid- 
dons and John Philip Kemble were in the 
plenitude of their powers, they played often 
to the bare benches of Drury Lane, while the 
same night Covent Garden would be packed 
with people eager to behold a real elephant 
take part in a spectacular pantomime. The 
elephant and the bear-baiting and the gladia- 
tors, each in their turn, pleased that part of the 
public which was still playing the Primitive 
Game — to use Dr. Pole's phrase — and which 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 75 

therefore was wholly incapable of understand- 
ing the Philosophic Game, so to speak, of Mrs. 
Siddons, of Shakespeare, and of Terence. 

And yet that portion of the public which 
clings to the Primitive Game has at least one 
fine quality: it is perfectly sincere. It is not 
a humbug or a sham. It knows what it likes, 
and it is not ashamed of its prejudices. It 
makes no pretence of regard for the more ad- 
vanced art it is unable to appreciate. It is 
frank and outspoken in its conviction that 
Hawthorne is slow and Turgeneff dull ; and it 
makes no effort whatever to conceal its opin- 
ion that Ibsen is tiresome and that Mr. How- 
ells is colorless. It is wholly without the 
snobbishness which induces not a few of those 
readers who really most enjoy the romances of 
Mr. Rider Haggard to pretend that they pre- 
fer the novels of Mr. George Meredith merely 
because there was once a Meredith cult among 
the cultured. 

I am inclined to believe that the position of 
that portion of the public which retains its 
primitive taste in literature is often misrepre- 
sented and even more often misunderstood. 
For one thing, this portion of the public is com- 
posed of plain people who are not only sincere 
themselves in their literary likes and dislikes. 



76 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

but are also swift to detect insincerity in the 
authors who seek to interest them. They re- 
volt at the slightest hint of condescension. 
They insist on being taken seriously; — and this 
is why the ingenious tales of accomplished lit- 
erators often fall flat, while hundreds of thou- 
sands were sold of the sensational stories of 
" Hugh Conway," who was not at all a man of 
letters. 

Here we find a possible explanation for a 
problem which has puzzled more than one gen- 
eration of literary critics — why do the writings 
of certain authors have an immense vogue, al- 
though these authors are seen to be without the 
really great qualities ? Is success in literature 
only a lottery ? Is the general public a fool 
then, easily to be led by the nose ? As there is 
no effect without a cause, there must be a reason 
for the popularity which sometimes seems to us 
unaccountable. The real explanation of the wel- 
come which was bestowed on the ' Proverbial 
Philosophy ' of the late Martin Farquhar Tup- 
per, for example, or on the novels of the late 
E. P. Roe, is to be sought in the sincerity of 
these two writers. Neither was in any way a 
charlatan. Both of them gave the public the 
best they had in them ; and, as it happened, 
they thus voiced the unformulated feelings 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 77 

of the segment of the reading circle to which 
they themselves belonged. So far from writ- 
ing down to the public taste, as they were 
accused of doing, they were, in fact, writing 
up to the taste of the portion of the public 
that welcomed their works. By their own 
birth and bringing up, both Mr. Tupper and 
Mr. Roe were in a measure representative of 
the " plain people," as Lincoln phrased it ; and 
they could not help taking the plain people's 
point of view. This the plain people recog- 
nized promptly; and the writers had their re- 
ward on the spot. Their writings lacked the 
permanent qualities of literature, no doubt, 
and that is why their vogue was temporary 
only. 

More accomplished men of letters than either 
Mr. Tupper or Mr. Roe have not taken this 
point of view naturally, and thus they have 
failed to voice the feelings of the very segment 
of the reading circle they hoped to please. In- 
deed, I doubt if any author who has tried to 
guess at the taste of the public that he might 
natter it, has ever made a hit satisfactory to 
himself ; and I am certain that no author who 
really despised his audience, as more than one 
author may have pretended that he did, has 
ever really pleased those to whom he made 



78 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

his appeal thus cynically. It happens that I 
have met at one time or another many of the 
novelists and dramatists of France, of England, 
and of America — those whom the critics delight 
to honor and those also at whom the criticas- 
ters joy to gird ; and the quality which the lat- 
ter class seemed to me to have most abundant- 
ly was earnestness. They believed in their own 
work, and they were doing it as well as in them 
lay. Their success was due to the fact that 
their best corresponded absolutely with the 
ideal of a certain segment of the reading circle 
or of a certain proportion of the play-goers. 
In other words, and to use another of the keen 
phrases attributed to Lincoln, these popular 
novelists and dramatists were producing " just 
the kind of thing that a man would like who 
liked that kind of thing." And that is why they 
met with a far wider success than the far cleverer 
and far more accomplished men of letters whose 
merits might be vaunted by all who had them- 
selves so far progressed in literature as to appre- 
ciate the Latterday Improvements, as Dr. Pole 
calls them. It is only now and again that there 
comes a rare writer able to delight at once his 
brethren of the craft and the plain people also ; 
and he does this not by trying to please the 
public, but rather by expressing himself and 



ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 79 

by doing always the best he knows how. His 
segment of reading circle subtends a very wide 
angle because his art is as firm as his outlook 
on our common humanity is broad. 

(1895-) 



ON CERTAIN PARALLELISMS BETWEEN 
THE ANCIENT AND THE MOD- 
ERN DRAMA 



[This paper was originally contributed to ' Classical Studies in 

Honor of Henry Drisler,' published in 1894 by the 

Columbia University Press.] 



ON CERTAIN PARALLELISMS BETWEEN 

THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN 

DRAMA 

For the man of letters who has let his clas- 
sical studies lapse on leaving college, and who 
takes them up again a score of years later, there 
are compensations, as I have recently discov- 
ered by personal experience. What the man 
of letters who does this has lost is incalculable 
and irrecoverable, no doubt, and what he may 
gain is but little indeed and of small worth — 
yet it is something if it be only a renewed fresh- 
ness of view. And it is indisputable that this 
is the chief gain — this ability to look at old 
texts from new standpoints, and to interpret 
the life and the literature of the past by the aid 
of a deeper knowledge of the life and the litera- 
ture of the present. 

The vital principles of any art are always the 
same, and they subsist through the ages essen- 
tially unchanged, however much they may seem 
to be modified superficially by the varying fash- 



84 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

ions of succeeding generations. Of no art 
are the fundamental laws more absolutely 
fixed than are those of the drama. When, 
therefore, one who has given his attention 
for twenty-five years to the modern stage re- 
turns to the study of the ancient theatre, he 
might fairly be expected now and again to 
note points of contact between the old and the 
new. 

A knowledge of the manners and customs of 
the players and the playwrights of Paris and 
London and New York enables the student to 
understand better than he could otherwise the 
manners and the customs of the players and the 
playwrights of Athens and Rome. When any 
one having an acquaintance with the modern 
playhouse inquires into the practices of the an- 
cient theatre, he cannot but remark in the older 
plays features which are often supposed to be 
the sole property of the most recent play- 
wrights. In the Greek theatre, for instance, it 
is not difficult to discover that the dramatist 
was generally careful to provide an " exit- 
speech " whenever an important character left 
the stage; nor is it hard to detect among the 
plays of Euripides more than one specimen of 
the " star-piece." Though there may be no 
Greek equivalents for these technical terms, 



THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 85 

the things these words denote existed in Greece 
none the less. 

The terminology of the contemporary thea- 
tre is precise and copious, although it has not 
as yet been recorded fully in any dictionary of 
the English language, or even in any technical 
vocabulary of its own. A " star -piece," for 
example, is a play so devised as to display all 
the histrionic powers of the performer of the 
chief part. Certain of Shakespeare's plays are 
obviously " star-pieces ": ' Hamlet,' for one, and 
1 Richard III.,' for another ; and so is the ' Medea ' 
of Euripides. Medea is not only the " star- 
part," but the other characters of the play are 
little more than mere "feeders" — that is to 
say, they exist, not for their own sake, but 
solely for their relation to Medea ; and they 
speak, not to reveal themselves, but solely to 
afford occasion to Medea to express herself 
fully and at length and under the strain of the 
most poignant emotions. The character played 
by the protagonist is all-important, and the char- 
acters played by the deuteragonist and by the 
tritagonist are all of them subordinated and 
effaced. It is known that there were strolling 
companies of performers in Greece and in the 
Grecian colonies, as there have been of late 
years in Great Britain and the United States 



86 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

(Haigh's ' Attic Theatre,' p. 43) ; and to give a 
fairly satisfactory performance of the 'Medea' 
only one great actor was needed. 

A renowned Athenian protagonist could " go 
on the road " with the ' Medea ' as certain of 
pleasing the multitudes who would flock to 
see him act in the theatres of the smaller 
Greek cities as Madame Sarah - Bernhardt is 
now certain to delight the audiences who fill 
the playhouses of all the larger towns of the 
whole world to behold her suffer and die in 
' La Tosca.' Nor has M. Sardou contrived ' La 
Tosca ' more adroitly for this special portabil- 
ity than Euripides composed the ' Medea.' 
Euripides is like M. Sardou in more ways 
than one ; in his exceeding cleverness, for in- 
stance, in his dramaturgic dexterity, in his 
mastery of theatrical device, in his predilec- 
tion for women as his chief characters. 

" It is stated," so Mr. Haigh reminds us in 
his admirable volume on the ' Attic Theatre ' 
(p. 76), citing the authorities for the statement, 
" that Sophocles was accustomed to write his 
plays with a view to the capacities of his ac- 
tors." No one who has investigated the meth- 
ods of the great modern dramatists would ven- 
ture to dispute this assertion ; and it would be 
easy to adduce reasons for thinking that Eurip- 



THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 8j 

ides did what Sophocles was accused of doing.* 
An analysis of the ■ Medea ' has convinced me 
that in composing this play Euripides was, in 
all probability, carefully " fitting " — to use the 
technical term of the theatre of to-day — some 
Athenian actor by whose extraordinary histri- 
onic ability he wished to profit, just as M. Sar- 
dou, in composing 'La Tosca,' fitted Madame 
Sarah-Bernhardt, just as Moliere, for that mat- 
ter, certainly fitted Mademoiselle de Moliere 
when he was writing ' Le Misanthrope,' and just 
as Shakespeare possibly fitted Master Bur- 
bage when he was writing ' Hamlet.' And while 
' Hamlet' and 'Le Misanthrope' are the master- 
pieces of their authors, the ' Medea,' again, is 
rather like ' La Tosca,' in that it owes its per- 
manent popularity to the histrionic opportuni- 
ties it affords. After all, what we go to the 
theatre to see is — in the final analysis — acting. 
Whatever we may like in the library, in the 
theatre we prefer the plays which give most 
scope to the actors. 

" Exit-speech " is the name given to the final 
words spoken by a character before he leaves 
the stage after an important scene. Nowa- 
days an exit-speech is generally a point of 

* Compare Aristotle, ' Poetics,' 9 (145 1 b 38). 



88 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

one kind or another, rhetorical or jocular. In 
Shakespeare's time the exit-speech very often 
ended with a couplet, the rymes of which 
were signals to the groundlings to be ready 
with their applause. In the great period of 
the Spanish drama, which was contemporary 
with the Elizabethan drama of England, the 
utility of the exit-speech was perfectly under- 
stood, and in the 'Arte nuevo de hacer come- 
dias/ in which Lope de Vega laid down pre- 
cepts for the guidance of practical dramatists, he 
advises the 'prentice playwright thus: "Adorn 
the end of your scenes with some swelling 
phrase, with some joke, with lines more care- 
fully polished, so that the actor at his exit 
does not leave the audience in ill-humor." In 
the Greek drama the exit-speech is frequent. 
In the ' Medea,' again, Jason's final words at 
the end of the stormy scene with his wife have 
all the characteristics of the exit - speech 
(619-22): — 

aXk ovv eya) p.ev baipovas paprvpopai, 
cos ndv6' virovpyziv croi re kol renvois SiXco ' 
<rol S' ovk dpecTKei rdydd', aXX' av0adia 
(piXovs diroddtl • roiyap akyvvel rrXeov. 

[Yet I call the gods to witness that I seek to help 
thee in all things and our children as well ; but thou 



THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 89 

carest nought for favors but spurnest thy friends in 
wilfulness, and for this thou shalt have the greater 
sorrow.] 

An exit-speech also of the most approved 
type is Medea's, when she leaves the stage 
after the marvellously pathetic scene with her 
children, and after the messenger has declared 
the success of her scheme to kill her rival 
(1244-50):— 

ay & Takaiva X €l P ^A 17 )' ^ a /3e £i<pos, 
Aa/3', epne rrpos /3aA/3i£a \v7rrjpav /3tov, 
Kal pr) KaKLcrOrjSt pr)?? avapvrjaOrjS t4kv<ov 
g>$ (pi\ra6', cos €tikt€S " aXXa. rrjvde ye 
XaOov fipaxtiav fjpepav iraidcov aedev, 
KaireiTa 6pr\vsi ' Kal yap el Krevtis cr(p' opas 
(plXoi y e(pv(rav, dvarvx^s S iyca yvvrj. 

[Come, thou daring hand of mine, grasp, grasp the 
sword ! Put thyself at the start of a miserable life ; 
and become not weak nor give thought to thy chil- 
dren, how dear to thee, how thou didst give them 
birth ! But forget thy children for this brief day, at 
least, and then bewail them ; for even if thou goest 
about to slay them, they were born into thy affection, 
and I — a wretched woman !] 

The complement of the exit -speech is the 
device now known as " working up an entrance." 
A leading actor likes to have his coming before 
the audience for the first time in the play care- 



90 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

fully prepared and plainly announced, so that 
expectancy may be aroused and recognition 
may follow at once upon his appearance on 
the stage. Every play-goer can recall instances 
of the ingenuity with which the modern play- 
wrights have been able to work up the en- 
trance of important characters; there is no 
better example, perhaps, than the first appear- 
ance of the heroine in 'Adrienne Lecouvreur,' 
the drama devised for Rachel by Scribe and 
M. Legouve. Now this working up an en- 
trance for the chief persons of the play was 
far more needful in the Greece of old than it 
is in the Paris and in the New York of to-day, 
for the Grecian theatres were many times the 
size of ours, and the actors wore masks which 
hid their features, and — so far as I know, at 
least — there were no programs to aid in 
identification. Therefore, we find that the 
Greek dramatists were very careful to work 
up the entrance even of unimportant charac- 
ters. In the ' Medea,' once more, after the pro- 
logue in which the nurse declares herself, no 
person of the play comes on unannounced by 
some one already on the stage ; and the ap- 
pearance of Medea herself is worked up quite 
in the most modern manner, her loud bewail- 
ings off the stage being expounded by the nurse. 



THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 9 1 

The fact is that the psychology of the the- 
atrical spectator is very much the same in all 
climes and in all ages. The New York boy 
who perches in the upper gallery of the Broad- 
way Theatre, however deficient in intelligence 
when compared with the citizen of Athens 
seated on a marble bench in the beautiful 
theatre of Dionysus, has needs like his in so 
far as they are both play-goers. Both demand 
clearness above all things ; both desire not to 
be left in doubt as to what is going on before 
them. For a man at the play, understanding 
is the condition precedent of enjoyment. 

It is greatly to be desired that some classical 
scholar should familiarize himself with the 
modern theatre, so that he might approach 
the study of the drama of antiquity with a full 
understanding of the present methods of the 
same art. Much of the value of Patin's ' Tra- 
giques Grecs ' is due to his knowledge of the 
French theatre and to his constant use of the 
modern stage for comparison with the ancient. 
In this, as in other respects, Professor Mahaffy 
has followed in Patin's footsteps. But no one 
has yet done for the Greeks what the late M. 
Goumy attempted to do for the Latins — to 
explain the past in terms of the present. It 
would be too much to say that M. Goumy, 



92 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

who died before he had half finished his task, 
was wholly successful in finding modern equiv- 
alents for ancient experiences. But ' Les La- 
tins ' is a volume to be read with refreshment 
and stimulation ; and it is good for us to be told 
that Caesar's ' Commentaries ' was really what 
we Americans might call "a campaign auto- 
biography," and that Cicero did not deliver 
his orations as they have come down to us, 
but " asked leave to print," so to speak, that he 
might polish his periods at leisure. 

Though I have neither the scholarship nor 
the time to undertake the explanation of the 
ancient drama by the modern theatre in the 
method I have suggested, I can furnish a few 
additional instances of parallelism perhaps not 
unworthy of record. The likeness of the Greek 
tragedy, with its appropriate music, its slow 
and stately movement, and its use of local 
legend, to the Wagnerian music-drama has been 
dwelt on sufficiently ; and, even as I penned 
these paragraphs, I found in the second number 
of the new Revue de Paris an essay on the 
specific resemblances of ' Die Walkure ' to the 
' Antigone.' But less attention has been drawn 
to a more recent return to Greek principles of 
playmaking, Ibsen's presentation of only the 
culminating point of the plot, and his concen- 



THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 93 

tration of all the interest of the action into its 
compact climax, in which the ' CEdipus Rex ' 
itself is scarcely more skilfully contrived than 
is ' Ghosts.' 

It may seem most irreverent to suggest a 
similarity between a masterpiece of humor like 
the 'Frogs' and an amusing modern burlesque 
like the 'Adonis,' in which Mr. Dixey parodied 
the peculiarities of Mr. Henry Irving, much 
as some Athenian comedian must have mim- 
icked the mannerisms of Euripides; but never- 
theless the similarity of the two pieces is strik- 
ing enough. Indeed, the difference between 
'Adonis ' and the ' Frogs' is due mainly to the 
fact that the author of ' Adonis ' was only a 
clever comic playwright, while the author of 
the ' Frogs ' happened also to be a great poet — 
just as it is also his poetic power which gives 
Euripides his immeasurable superiority over 
M. Sardou. In the ' Frogs,' for example, Bac- 
chus, in the costume of Hercules, is like a 
modern actor in classic attire, crowned with 
the very latest style of stove-pipe hat ; and 
when Bacchus appeals to his priest sitting of- 
ficially in front of the stage, he is not unlike 
the comedian of our time who holds a colloquy 
with the leader of the band. I confess that 
the comic servant, Xanthias, in the ' Frogs,' 



94 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

complaining that he is not allowed to complain, 
reminds me of the comic servant, Greppo, in 
the ' Black Crook,' also involved in mysterious 
adventures which he does not understand. 

I wonder whether or not it was a tradition 
of the Grecian theatres that the performer who 
played Xanthias, or any other comic servant of 
the sort, should wear many garments of con- 
trasting colors, superimposed one on the other 
so that he might excite the laughter of un- 
thinking spectators by removing them one by 
one. This "business" is traditional with the 
Second Grave - digger in the ' Hamlet ' of 
Shakespeare, and with Jodelet in the ' Pre- 
cieuses Ridicules' of Moliere; and it is derived 
probably from some forgotten farce of the 
Middle Ages, which in turn was possibly de- 
scended from some Roman pantomime. Vis- 
ible jests of this kind are very long-lived, and 
no doubt many of them passed over from the 
Latin fabulce Atellance to the Italian commedie 
delV arte. 

For the adapted comedies of Plautus and 
Terence, with abundant Roman allusions flow- 
ering out of Grecian plots, more or less skil- 
fully transplanted, there are many modern 
parallels. It is not at all uncommon to see 
on the modern English-speaking stage a French 



THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 95 

or a German play, roughly twisted into con- 
formity with the conditions of British or Amer- 
ican life. They may be amusing, like Mr. 
Augustin Daly's later adaptations from the 
German, or they may be exciting like some of 
his earlier adaptations from the French; yet 
there cannot but be always an obvious and 
inevitable unreality in any drama merely de- 
canted in this fashion. While the comedies 
of Plautus may thus be likened, not unfairly, 
to the modern English localized arrangements 
of foreign plays, the skill with which the Latin 
dramatist presented the every-day life of the 
Roman household and market-place suggests 
that his comedies may also be compared with 
the amusing and broadly sketched pieces in 
which Mr. Harrigan has most comically set 
before us the characteristics of the polyglot 
population of New York. 

Perhaps no peculiarity of Greek comedy has 
seemed stranger to latter-day commentators 
than the parabasis ; and yet to discover mod- 
ern equivalents even for this is not difficult. 
I think it is even possible to derive from our 
own experience the reason why the earlier 
dramatists were moved to make use of this 
device. The parabasis — so Miiller describes it 
in the ' History of the Literature of Ancient 



96 aspects of fiction 

Greece (i., p. 401) — is "an address of the chorus 
in the middle of the comedy"; and in it "the 
poet makes his chorus speak of his own poet- 
ical affairs, of the object and end of his pro- 
ductions, of his services to the state, of his 
relation to his rivals, and so forth." Then the 
chorus sings a lyrical poem, and recites in tro- 
chaic verse " some joking complaint, some 
reproach against the city, some witty sally 
against the people." It is this second part of 
the parabasis that Professor MahafTy, in his 
1 History of Greek Literature ' (i., chap, xx.) 
likens to the " topical song " of the modern 
burlesque, " which is always composed on cur- 
rent events, and has verses added from week 
to week, as new points of public interest crop 
up." 

The first part of the parabasis, wherein the 
poet makes the chorus his own mouthpiece, 
and addresses the audience almost in his own 
person, is very closely akin to the Elizabethan 
prologue, in which the dramatist discussed the 
play about to be performed, in which occasion- 
ally he abused his rivals, and in which he some- 
times vaunted himself. And here the prologue, 
like the parabasis, performed a useful function ; 
for as the psychology of the play-goer changes 
but little through the ages, so also the psychol- 



THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 97 

ogy of the playwright is substantially the same 
in Periclean Athens and in Elizabethan Lon- 
don. Above all things, the spectator wants 
to be able to understand what he is seeing, 
and the dramatist wishes to have his work 
seen from his own point of view. The play- 
wright is glad to have the right of rising to a 
personal explanation. Nowadays the novelist 
and the poet can declare in a preface the code 
by which they wish to be judged. The dram- 
atist cannot avail himself of this privilege ; 
and the prologue is the only preface he is per- 
mitted. If he cannot get the ear of the public 
for an explanation outside of his work, he must 
perforce make this explanation a part of the 
work itself, placing it either at the beginning, 
as Ben Jonson did, or in the middle, as did 
Aristophanes. 

The frequency with which the prologue was 
made to perform this function is well brought 
out in 'A Study of the Prologue and Epilogue 
in English Literature,' (by "G. S. B.," London, 
1884), wherein it is shown that the prologue 
was of real service to Ben Jonson, and that it 
was useful even to Dryden, although he had 
already other means of reaching the public ear. 
The prologue and the epilogue still accom- 
panied new plays at the end of the eighteenth 



9S ASPECTS OF FICTION 

century, although they had ceased to have any 
close connection with the pieces before and 
after which they were spoken. It is obvious 
that the prologue and epilogue in Sheridan's 
plays, for example, are mere survivals of an 
outworn fashion. 

Yet even in this century, when the dramatist 
can call on the journalists to publish abroad 
any declaration he may desire to make, there 
are occasions when the temptation to expound 
his own theories of his art inside the work of 
art itself are too strong to be overcome. In 
the 'Antony' of the elder Dumas, in the fourth 
act, there is a discussion between Eugene and 
the Baron de Marsanne about Romanticism ; 
what is this but a prose parabasis cut into dia- 
logue ? And in the ' Denise ' of the younger 
Dumas, the analysis of the thesis of the piece 
by Thouvenin — in what manner does this dif- 
fer essentially from the parabasis? So frequent 
has been the use of a character like Thouvenin 
by M. Dumas fils, and by certain of his con- 
temporaries, that the French critics have been 
forced to find a name for this new stage-type ; 
they call the character who explains the play a 
raisonneur. As it happens, the delivery of the 
parabasis is not the sole duty of the raisonneur, 
for he performs other functions of the chorus, 



THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 99 

of which multiple personality he may be sup- 
posed to be a condensation into a single per- 
son. He listens to the talk of the hero and of 
the heroine, taking the part of the confidant of 
French tragedy (itself a feeble substitute for 
the chorus of Greek tragedy) ; he asks the 
proper questions to evoke the fullest expres- 
sion of the hero's and the heroine's sentiments; 
he is properly sympathetic ; and he also serves 
as a speaking-trumpet for the author, being 
sometimes, as in ' Les Idees de Madame Au- 
brey,' charged with the utterance of the final 
moral. 

To the ancient chorus and to the modern 
raisonneur there was even a medieval ana- 
logue. In the interludes — which followed the 
mysteries and the moralities, and which with 
them prepared players and play-goers for the 
coming of the dramatized chronicle and of the 
romantic drama — "not infrequently," so Sy- 
monds records in his ' Shakespeare's Predeces- 
sors in the English Drama' (p. 176), "a Doctor, 
surviving from the Expositor of the miracles, 
interpreted the allegory as the action pro- 
ceeded." 

(1894.) 



LofC. 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 



[This paper was read at the General Meeting of the Congress 

of Philological and Archaeological Societies held at the 

University of Pennsylvania, Dec. 27, 1900.] 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 

To a student of the development of the 
drama, nothing is more helpful than a firm 
grasp on the fact that the drama has no need to 
be literary to accomplish its immediate purpose. 
The playmaking faculty is perhaps the first of 
all to find free exercise : and there are few 
primitive peoples who have not revealed very 
early their delight in crude farce and in sym- 
bolic pantomime. Those rude efforts may not 
demand consideration as literature, in the loftier 
meaning of that overworked word; they are 
always artless, frequently formless, and some- 
times, in our modern eyes, even pointless. But 
without them, rough as they were and uncouth 
and vulgar, the later drama could never have 
developed. In Greece, for instance, the mystic 
dances of the Eleusinia led to the performance 
of a primitive miracle-play representing the sor- 
rows and consolations of Demeter : and in these 
mystic dances therefore we must seek the germ 
of Greek tragedy. In England again, the robust 



104 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

fooling of the fun-loving medieval burghers — 
as we find it preserved in the laughable scenes 
of Noah and his wife and of the shepherd Mak 
and his mates — was one of the roots out of which 
was to spring the splendid flower of English 
romantic comedy. And in France, once more, 
the fabliau hastily cast into dialogue by some 
wandering jongleur to serve a chance occasion — 
an obvious practical joke shown in action, as in 
the 'Cuvier' and in the * Pate et la Tarte,' was 
the remote origin of the searching and dignified 
comedy the most consummate example of which 
is the ' Femmes Savantes.' 

Professor Grosse in his suggestive discussion 
on the ' Beginnings of Art ' declares that " the 
drama is regarded by most historians of litera- 
ture and esthetics as the latest form of poetry ; 
yet we can say, with a certain degree of right, 
that it is the earliest. . . . We can prove 
the existence of the drama ... in the low- 
est stages of culture." The apparent disagree- 
ment between Professor Grosse and these other 
historians of esthetics is due to the circumstance 
that neither he nor they have seized firmly the 
fact that in its beginnings the drama is of neces- 
sity unliterary, and that it is the folk-theatre 
which makes possible the development of a true 
dramatic literature. This is often overlooked, 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 105 

because when the drama is once established 
securely as a form of poetry, its origin in the 
lowest stages of culture is carelessly forgotten. 
The written word of the poet abides more dura- 
ble than bronze, standing as a model to future 
generations, while the primitive play was not 
preserved because it lacked literature, being in- 
deed often unwritten, having been brought into 
existence by word of mouth. However profit- 
able it would be if we could trace the successive 
stages of the evolution of the folk-play into the 
poetic drama, we are foiled in the attempt by the 
scantiness of the records the folk-theatre has left. 
The text of the miracle-play of Demeter is lost 
forever, if indeed it ever existed save in oral 
tradition. It served its purpose and passed out 
of men's memories, save for a casual allusion here 
and there to be collected laboriously by the his- 
torians of literature. 

In his consideration of the * Races of Europe,' 
Professor Ripley declares that " the greatest ob- 
stacle heretofore to the prosecution of the half- 
written history of the common people has been 
the lack of proper raw materials. There is a 
mine of information here which has been barely 
opened to view on the surface." Probably the 
best way for the student of dramatic evolution 
to get at this mine of information is to avail 



106 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

himself, so far as may be, of the methods of 
comparative anthropology. It was the adoption 
of these methods which enabled Mr. Lang to 
solve some of the most puzzling problems of 
mythology. Just as Mr. Lang made use of his 
acquaintance with the snake-dance of the Mokis 
of Arizona to elucidate a somewhat similar cere- 
mony recorded in the pages of Demosthenes, so 
anyone who wishes to understand the un literary 
drama of the past must make himself familiar 
with the unliterary drama of the present — with 
the rough melodrama of the cheap theatres, 
with the vigorous and violent farce of the vari- 
ety-show, with the song-and-dance of the so- 
called vaudeville performances, with the ele- 
mentary plays proffered by negro-minstrels and 
circus clowns. A knowledge of these humble 
forms of the drama is to a student of dramatic 
literature as useful, and indeed as necessary, as 
a knowledge of embryology is to a student of 
zoology. 

An investigator of dramaturgic history who 
has also an acquaintance with these various 
specimens of the unliterary drama of his own 
time, is continually happening upon significant 
parallelisms. He keeps finding what may be 
termed either curious anticipations in the past 
or else strange survivals in the present. For 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 1 07 

instance, the dialogues of Tabarin and his mas- 
ter are probably fairly typical of the chop-logic 
conversations between the quack doctor and his 
jack-pudding throughout the middle ages and 
well on into modern times. Now almost the 
first thing which strikes the reader of the 'CEu- 
vres de Tabarin ' — after he has made due allow- 
ance for its flagrant grossness — is the close 
analogy between those dialogues and the give- 
and-take repartee with which the clown in the 
circus gets the better of the pompous ringmas- 
ter, and the cut-and-thrust retorts with which 
the end-man of the negro-minstrels retaliates 
upon the polysyllabic interlocutor. If we find 
this type of vehemently comic dialogue flourish- 
ing now in the twentieth century here in Amer- 
ica and also early in the seventeenth century in 
France, is it too hazardous to hint a possibility 
that something not unlike it may have been 
known in Greece in the third century before 
our era, and that perhaps Epicharmos and So- 
phron anticipated the humorous methods of 
Tabarin two thousand years before the Franco- 
Italian jester was born ? 

Here indeed is little more than a mere survival, 
without any development of a lower form into a 
higher. But in the instructive pages of M. Mau- 
rice Albert — who has recently told us the story 



108 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

of the rise and fall of the theatres which were 
allowed to exist in one or another of the fairs 
held at different seasons of the year in different 
quarters of Paris from the middle of the seven- 
teenth century to the end of the eighteenth — 
we are allowed to consider the successive stages 
of a slow evolution, at the end of which the 
dramatic literature of France was enriched by 
two wholly new forms — the melodrama and the 
opera-comique — forms as prolific in the past cen- 
tury as either comedy or tragedy and as charac- 
teristic of the French dramatic faculty. 

M. Albert traces the steps by which the show- 
men who exhibited at first only feats of strength 
and skill, tight-rope-dancing, ground and lofty 
tumbling and the like, speedily broke out into 
song -and -dance and then rapidly elaborated 
song-and-dance into parody of the more preten- 
tious performances of the Opera and Comedie- 
Francaise, still relying upon acrobatics as an 
important element in the delight they gave to 
those who paid to see their performances. Hav- 
ing no ulterior aim, and trying only to amuse 
the pleasure-seeking Parisians, bound by no 
rules and free from all academic criticism, the 
theatre of the Fair expanded freely except in 
so far as the Opera and the Comedie-Francaise 
were able to cramp its development. It called 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 109 

to its aid the adroit and fertile Le Sage and his 
collaborators, some of them almost as ingenious 
as he. It strove solely to divert without thought 
of literary standards, and so it grew luxuriantly 
for a century and a quarter : and when at last 
the Fair outlived its usefulness and was aban- 
doned, more than one of its theatres was firmly 
established on the Boulevard to remain to this 
day, the home of melodrama, born and nurtured 
and brought to maturity in the Fair. 

It was for these melodramatic theatres that 
Pixerecourt and Ducange wrote their striking 
and effective dramas, essentially the same as the 
plays which had been performed in the Fair, 
although somewhat ampler in manner and per- 
haps more artistically complicated in plot. And 
it was from the Boulevard melodramatists of 
the first quarter of this century, it was from 
Ducange and Pixerecourt and their associates, 
that the Romanticists of 1830 learnt how to 
construct a plot which would hold an audience 
breathless. 

A melodrama may be defined roughly as a 
piece in which the situations create the charac- 
ters and in which the persons of the play exist 
chiefly if not solely for the sake of the plot : 
whereas in tragedy and in the serious drama it is 
what the characters are that is important, rather 



HO ASPECTS OF FICTION 

than what they do, and the action is devised to 
reveal these characters completely. The differ- 
ence between Hugo's ' Ruy Bias ' and Dumas's 
* Tour de Nesle ' on the one hand, and on the 
other ' Thirty Years of a Gambler's Life,' is 
not a difference in kind ; it is only a difference 
in literary skill. Melodrama had come to ma- 
turity without the aid of literature, and now 
that it had proved itself, the men of letters 
adopted it as their own. 

No doubt the historian of dramatic literature 
as he studies to-day the annals of the earlier 
theatre can discover here and there plays which 
fall within the definition of melodrama; he can 
find them not only in the Elizabethan tragedy- 
of-blood but even among the works of the 
Greek tragedians. But it was not from Greek 
tragedy or Elizabethan that modern melodrama 
sprang, but from the unpretending efforts of the 
modest and enterprising purveyors of amuse- 
ment who directed the variety-shows of the 
Parisian fairs during the eighteenth century and 
who sought by every means to arouse and to 
retain the interest of their chance audiences. 
In M. Albert's pages may be read the record of 
the tentative efforts, now successful and now 
unsuccessful, by which, in the course of a hun- 
dred years, the elementary song-and-dance was 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE III 

developed into the artfully articulated melo- 
drama. 

And from the same elementary song-and- 
dance in the same variety-shows during the 
same hundred years was also developed opera- 
comique — not merely the comic opera which is 
often only buffoonery and glitter, but the finer 
form of which ' Crown Diamonds ' may be taken 
as the type and of which ' Mignon ' and ' Car- 
men ' are later examples. The opera-comique, 
it is true, is not wholly the child of the folk- 
theatre of the Fair ; it is partly the result of a 
fusion of one of the theatres of the Fair with 
the so-called Comedie-Italienne. 

But the Comedie-Italienne itself was the child 
of another folk-theatre. It had been established 
to afford a shelter in France for the Italian act- 
ors of improvised comic plays, the commedie 
delV arte. Now the Italian actors of this com- 
edy-of-masks were in the beginning only a step 
removed from the performers of the variety- 
show ; even under Louis XIV. in the days of 
the famous Arlequin Dominique, they freely in- 
termingled acrobatics with their dramatics, and 
their clown had to be as ready to turn a somer- 
sault as to crack a joke. It is to be recorded 
here also that earlier in its career this improvised 
comic drama — frankly unliterary as it was, since 



112 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

the play was even unwritten, being plotted only 
— had proved a stimulus to the youthful Mo- 
liere, whose 'prentice work discloses an obvious 
imitation of the methods of the Italian comedi- 
ans. From these graduates of the folk-theatre, 
Moliere learned how to show a story in action 
so briskly as never to bore the spectators — just 
as Victor Hugo availed himself of the experience 
of Pixerecourt and Ducange in the devising of 
the framework of the plot which he was going 
to drape with the cloth-of-gold of his marvellous 
lyrism. 

Nor need we go back to the seventeenth cen- 
tury and to the commedia delV arte, nor to the 
eighteenth century and the French theatre of 
the Fair; here in America in the nineteenth 
century there are instances enough of a like de- 
velopment from the variety-show into a more 
elaborate dramatic form. It is a scant score of 
years since Mr. Denman Thompson began mod- 
ifying and enriching a crude dramatic sketch 
known as ' Josh Whitcomb among the Female 
Bathers ' (and performed here in New York at 
a hall which the police closed more than once 
when the exhibitions crossed the line of tolera- 
tion) into that latter-day pastoral, the 'Old 
Homestead,' the long-continued popularity of 
which undoubtedly prepared the way for Mr. 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 113 

Heme's 'Shore Acres,' a stage-study of rural 
life, delightful in its direct verity. 

A more striking example can be found in 
the theatrical career of Mr. Edward Harrigan. 
This ingenious performer came to New York 
some twenty-five years ago with an associate 
named Hart, and the two appeared together in 
a variety-show, singing songs (the words of which 
were written by Mr. Harrigan) and imperson- 
ating always distinct types of Americanized 
Irishmen. These songs had a strong local flavor, 
and the music composed for them was happily 
tuneful ; and the favor with which they were 
received led Mr. Harrigan first to expand the 
spoken dialogues which intervened between the 
stanzas and the recurrent chorus, and then to 
call in the aid of other variety-performers also 
skilled in reproducing the readily recognizable 
characteristics of Hibernian New Yorkers. The 
original duet was elaborated into a more popu- 
lous musical sketch, of which the ' Mulligan 
Guards ' was the earliest example. The sim- 
ple dramatic action, which was at first the mere 
decoration of a single song, was broadened into 
the semblance of a plot, thus making a one-act 
farce in which there were several musical num- 
bers and in which there figured a variety of 
local types ; such a farce was the ' Mulligan 



114 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Guards' Picnic' Then in turn other of the 
dwellers in the motley tenement-house districts 
were introduced — the German, the Italian, the 
Chinaman and the negro — and the sketch in one 
act was enlarged to a comic play in two acts and 
finally in three acts. Such a play was * Squat- 
ter Sovereignty,' which may be taken as the 
culmination of Mr. Harrigan's effort to give 
dramatic form to his acquaintance with the cos- 
mopolitan inhabitants of Manhattan. 

Thus in less than a score of years a definite 
type of humorous drama had been developed in 
a single city by the effort of one man, a type 
which might have survived and got itself rec- 
ognized as such in dramatic literature if it had 
had the fortune to be adopted by other play- 
wrights of equal skill and of an equal knowl- 
edge of local conditions, or if Mr. Harrigan 
himself had been able to retain his position at 
this level. ' Squatter Sovereignty ' did for 
certain aspects of New York what ' Shore 
Acres ' did for certain aspects of New England, 
what ' In Mizzoura ' did for certain aspects of 
the States on the further side of the Mississippi. 
Perhaps it is the closest modern analogue to the 
comedy of Plautus in which we are made famil- 
iar with the habits of speech and the modes of 
thought of the Roman populace. 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 115 

One may even venture the reflection that if 
there had happened to be a young Moliere writ- 
ing for the American stage here in New York 
when ' Squatter Sovereignty ' was in the flood- 
tide of its success, he would have found ready 
to his hand a form really richer and riper than 
the Italian comedy-of-masks, of which the au- 
thor of ' L'Etourdi ' had to avail himself in de- 
fault of a better. Unfortunately there was no 
young Moliere then in New York, and now the 
tradition bids fair to be lost — the tradition 
which he could have taken as his own, secure 
in his confidence that the playgoing public had 
already approved it, just as Shakspere was 
secure when he followed in the footsteps of 
Marlowe. 

"Acting was the especial amusement of the 
English, from the palace to the village green," 
Froude records. " The mystery plays came 
first ; next popular legends ; and then the 
great figures of English History came out upon 
the stage, or stories from Greek and Roman 
writers; or sometimes it was an extemporized 
allegory. Shakspere himself has left us many 
pictures of the village drama. Doubtless he had 
seen many a Bottom in the old Warwickshire 
hamlets. He had been with Snug the joiner, 
Quince the carpenter, and Flute the bellows- 



Il6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

mender, when a boy, we will not question, and 
acted with them and written their parts for 
them." Of these mysteries and chronicle-plays 
and extemporized allegories we have not a few 
specimens preserved for us by good fortune, and 
we can see that they are rude things most of 
them, now and then roughly effective in the 
acting, no doubt, but ever lacking in literature. 
Even when the scholar had lent a hand in the 
fashioning of them, he had laid aside his learn- 
ing and written as one of the ignorant. Here 
we have plays composed by the people, and for 
the people — true folk-plays for the real folk- 
theatre ; and in these popular theatrical per- 
formances existed the promise and the potency 
of the brilliant and mirthful Shaksperian 
comedy and of the awe-inspiring and soul- 
searching Shaksperian tragedy. It is because 
these theatrical performances were popular, be- 
cause they pleased the people, because they 
showed by example how the people were to be 
pleased, that they were so suggestive and so 
valuable to the dramatists who came after, writ- 
ers more highly cultivated in taste and more 
richly endowed by nature thara the unknown 
contrivers of the chronicle-plays, or than the for- 
gotten extemporizers of allegory. The best of 
these folk-plays might be without many things 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 117 

that we think desirable in a work of dramatic 
art ; but they had the one thing needful. 

This one thing needful is precisely what was 
wanting in the stiff and scholastic dramatic at- 
tempts of the more learned poets in answer to 
the demand of the Italianate critics. Sir Philip 
Sidney, for example, obviously relished in a 
play not its essential dramatic quality, but its 
external conformity with the rules as these had 
been codified by the Renascence theorizers. 
He did not grasp the fundamental fact that the 
proof of the play is in the acting. It is of sec- 
ondary importance whether the piece can be 
read with pleasure in the library ; the prime 
merit is that it can be seen with pleasure on the 
stage. Here Aristotle, whom Sidney cites with 
humility, is not in agreement with him, for the 
great Greek critic is plainly of opinion that the 
dramatist must never narrow his appeal. As 
Professor Butcher sums up his doctrine ; " Aris- 
totle distrusts the verdict of specialists in the 
arts and prefers the popular judgment — but it 
must be the judgment of the cultivated public.'' 

Sidney was as wrong on one side in rejecting 
the popular element as the unlettered folk-play- 
wright was on the other in not paying due re- 
gard to the desires of the cultivated public. The 
difficulty of the dramatist — and his great reward 



Il8 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

if he can overcome it — is that he cannot limit 
his audience to a clique or caste or a sect as 
even the novelist may. It is a condition pre- 
cedent of his success that he must interest men 
and women young and old, rich and poor, the 
absolutely ignorant and the highly cultivated. 
The tragedies of Sophocles and the lyrical bur- 
lesques of Aristophanes were devised to impress 
the whole body of the citizens of Athens, or at 
least as many of them as might find places in 
the immense open-air theatre that held so many 
thousand spectators. The histories of Shak- 
spere and his joyous and melancholy comedies 
were prepared to amuse at once the groundlings 
who stood in the yard, the gallants who sat on 
the stage, and the city-madams who flirted in 
the rooms above. The theatres of Rome were 
attractive only to the lower orders of the popu- 
lace, soldiers and rustics, freedmen and slaves, 
therefore the comedies of Terence failed dis- 
mally and the comedies of Plautus were debased 
to meet the taste of the vulgar ; and this is the 
chief reason why the dramatic literature of the 
Latin language will not withstand comparison 
with the poetry or the oratory of that noble 
tongue. The theatres in Rome were without 
the cultivated public that Aristotle demanded ; 
they were without an adequate admixture of 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK- THEATRE 119 

the cultivated and the uncultivated ; without 
the leaven which lightened the mass of the Eliz- 
abethan audiences, and which is evident enough 
in our modern audiences also. The dramatist to- 
day, like his predecessor who was Shakspere's 
contemporary, has so to compose and proportion 
his play that he pleases the boys in the gallery 
without displeasing the ladies in the stage-boxes. 
It is only by adopting the practices of the 
earlier playwrights trained in the folk-theatre 
that the later dramatists can hope to prepare 
plays able to hold the interest of the unlettered 
majority while also able to delight the more 
literary minority. The drama can hope to 
flourish as a form of poetry only when play- 
goers and players and play-makers have long 
been accustomed to working together. We 
have the whole history of dramatic literature to 
bear witness to this assertion that the poetic 
drama can be born with a chance of survival 
only when the poet is willing to take over the 
simple type wrought out by the humble play- 
maker of the folk-theatre. The poet may refine 
upon what he borrows, he may even in time re- 
make it ; but he must begin where the earlier 
craftsman left off. The ancient Greeks, for in- 
stance, were artistically the most gifted of peo- 
ples; and they were able to raise their folk- 



120 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

drama to a form of poetry by their own unerring 
instinct for the beautiful, by their own tran- 
scendent feeling for perfection. In all modern 
literatures, the influence of the Greek drama has 
been stimulating, when it was accepted as an 
ally to aid in the growth of the native folk- 
theatre solidly rooted in the affections of the 
people. But when it was imposed as an abso- 
lute model to be accepted without regard to 
modern needs and modern conditions it was 
not stimulating — it was sterilizing. As Ben 
Jonson declared with his usual common sense, 
" The writings of the ancients are guides, not 
commanders." 

In their desire for a drama which should also 
be a form of poetry the critics of the Renas- 
cence, when modern literature was on its pro- 
bation, reverenced the tragedy of the great 
Greeks as an unapproachable ideal — and their 
respect was none the less because they may 
really have preferred the rhetorical and didactic 
Seneca to the truly tragic Sophocles. In the 
sixteenth century when the Italian esthetic the- 
orists were beginning to forge the triple frame- 
work of the Unities of Action, of Time, and of 
Place, a steel cage in which so many of the 
poets of Europe were to be confined, Italy itself 
had a flourishing folk-theatre. So had France 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 121 

and Spain and England also, where the plain 
people were entertained with mysteries and 
moralities, with brisk interludes and broad farces. 
But in Italy this folk-theatre had assumed a 
form special to itself — the commedia delV arte, 
the comedy-of-masks. Strolling companies of 
actors, each of whom represented always the 
same fixed character whatever the circumstances 
of the story, were accustomed to perform im- 
provised pieces — dramas in which the plot was 
outlined only, and in which the players made 
up the dialogue out of their own heads. Here 
was a popular theatre ready to the hand of the 
true dramatist, who should have accepted the 
traditional conditions and who should have 
bided his time cleverly to lift this comedy-of- 
masks into literature. That this elevation of 
the type was possible we know, because we can 
see that Moliere did it a century or more later, 
and so did Gozzi again more than a century 
after Moliere. But there was no true dramatist 
in Italy then ; and the men of letters who might 
have been made into dramatists refused to learn 
from the unlettered and so scorned the corn- 
media delV arte with its Pantaleone and its Ar- 
lechino that they refused to reckon with it, pre- 
ferring to write plays of their own in empty 
imitation of Terence — not knowing that if the 



122 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

improvised comedy is really derived from the 
fabulce Atellance, it has the same remote an- 
cestry as Latin comedy. Because the Italian 
men of letters despised the existing folk-theatre 
of the plain people, and would not condescend 
to help it to higher things, Italy failed to pos- 
sess a poetic drama. The plays the men of let- 
ters wrote had no roots in the soil and they 
withered speedily. The plays that the people 
enjoyed continued to be without literary qual- 
ity. As a form of poetry the drama can scarce- 
ly be said to have existed in Italy until the end 
of the eighteenth century, and even then it was 
a transplanted exotic from France. 

Spain was more fortunate. Spain had also 
its folk-theatre, seemingly very similar to that 
which had come into being in England. In 
Lope de Vega the Iberian peninsula had luck- 
ily the man of letters the Italian peninsula 
lacked — a man of letters willing to take the ex- 
isting unliterary play and to raise this into a 
form of poetry. Unhappily, however, Lope was 
more of a popular play-maker than he was a 
poet. He was afraid often to do his best, and 
he was not willing to keep the varied move- 
ment of the traditional folk-play and to combine 
with this the order and the elevation of the 
great Greeks. As a scholar Lope was acquaint- 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE I 23 

ed with the masterpieces of antiquity, but as a 
dramatist he felt himself forced sadly to refuse 
their counsel. He tells us that when he en- 
tered his study to compose a comedy, he prompt- 
ly locked up Terence and Plautus out of sight. 
Even in the finest plays of Lope's marvellous 
successor, Calderon, we find rather a spectacular 
skill and an overwhelming lyric fervor than the 
solid mass and dignity of a truly great drama- 
tist's masterpieces. In other words, the Span- 
ish folk-theatre was too strong for the men of 
letters to capture it entirely, rather were they 
taken captive ; and as we study the dramatic 
literature of Spain we cannot but feel that, af- 
fluent and splendid as it is, it would have been 
far more artistic, far loftier even, if it had come 
more completely under the influence of the 
classic ideal — if, while refusing blind obedience 
to the ancients, it had been more willing to 
accept their guidance. 

In France, where the folk-theatre was as ac- 
tive and as vigorous as in Spain, the social in- 
stinct of the people and their eagerness for 
logic, for order, and even for restraint, made the 
task easier for the Italianate critics who de- 
manded an implicit acceptance of the classicist 
doctrine. Fortunately Rotrou and Corneille 
and Moliere began all of them as practical play- 



124 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

wrights, learning how to please the plain people 
before they spared a thought for the desires of 
the cultivated. Corneille apparently had given 
little heed to any theory of his art until he was 
forced to defend the * Cid ' ; and Moliere, al- 
though grounded in his classics as became a 
pupil of the Jesuits, had too much common 
sense ever to mistake the shadow for the sub- 
stance. Yet the French are the inheritors of 
the Latin tradition and they have a national 
liking for the strong arm of the law, so that the 
code of the Three Unities appealed to them far 
more than it did to the Spaniards. And its ac- 
ceptance was hastened by a special circumstance 
derived from the conditions under which the 
earlier mysteries were presented. In England 
the successive acts of this primitive play were 
shown on separate carts decorated for the pur- 
pose and not unlike these we now call floats 
(they were then termed pageants)', but in 
France the various scenes were set up altogeth- 
er on a long stage, with Heaven on the far 
right, and with Hellmouth on the far left, 
while the Temple and the House of the High 
Priest and the Lake of Gennesaret stretched 
along, one by the side of the other, all visible 
at the same time. The Hotel de Bourgogne, 
long the sole theatre of Paris, was constructed 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 1 25 

specially for these mysteries, and its stage was 
accustomed to this tumultuous medley of places, 
which must have become increasingly distract- 
ing as more or less original plots came in turn 
to take the place of the familiar episodes of the 
sacred story. When this scenic complexity 
was abolished under plea of securing the Unity 
of Place, probably the simplification was quite 
welcome to the plain people who made up the 
bulk of the play-going public. 

In this conflict between the mere theories of 
the scholars and the actual practice of the pop- 
ular play -makers, the former got the best of 
it in France and the latter in Spain. In Eng- 
land the result of the struggle was more sat- 
isfactory than anywhere else. The English 
dramatists rejected absolutely the artificial leg- 
islation of the Italian theorists ; but their mas- 
terpieces survive to prove that they accepted 
the essential principles of classic art. The con- 
temporary critics could not be expected to see 
this, and even the English dramatists themselves 
may have been unconscious of their conformity 
with Greek ideals. Yet it is only by allowing 
due weight to the mighty influence exerted by 
even a slight familiarity with the great Greek 
tragedies, perhaps seem dimly through a trans- 
lation, that we can understand how it was that 



126 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

the robust play which had no pretence to art or 
to literature, and which was planned solely to 
please the groundlings who revelled in the gore 
and the bombast and the violence of the trag- 
edy-of-blood — how it was that this uncouth 
play was purified by slow degrees and trans- 
formed at last so that the same public was led 
to enjoy and to applaud * Othello ' and ' Mac- 
beth,' tragedies of lofty purpose, with a sim- 
plicity of theme and a unity of structure essen- 
tially Greek, while possessing also a freedom 
and an affluence characteristically English. 

Thus we see that the Elizabethan drama 
which is the chief glory of English literature, is 
like the Spanish drama of the golden period 
and like the French drama of Louis XIV., in 
that it was an outgrowth of the native folk- 
play, unliterary as that was and often unwritten. 
We can see also — and it would not be difficult 
to demonstrate in detail — that the closet-drama, 
so called that the play written with no intent 
that it should be played, that the poem in dia- 
logue composed by a man of letters without re- 
gard to the actual conditions of the theatre of his 
own time, has contributed nothing whatever to 
this splendid result. ' Samson Agonistes,' and 
1 Manfred ' and ' Prometheus Unbound ' are im- 
portant to the lovers of English poetry, but they 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 127 

may be neglected by the historians of the Eng- 
lish drama. They are as academic (and almost 
as unreal from one point of view) as * Atalanta 
in Calydon ' and * Merope.' They stand out- 
side the current, like the absurd plays written 
by the nun of Gandesheim which occupy an 
inexcusable space in some histories of the drama. 
An anonymous farce like * Patelin ' is of more 
importance in the history of French comedy than 
are all the unactable plays of Byron and Shelley, 
of Browning and Swinburne, in the history of 
English tragedy. Victor Hugo's 'Hernani' is 
an important document in the record of French 
drama, but his ' Cromwell,' which was never 
performed, is of significance only because of its 
preface. And ' Hernani ' when stripped of its 
lyric adornment is seen to depend for its interest 
on devices, invented by Pixerecourt and Du- 
cange when they were bringing to its mechani- 
cal perfection a dramatic form originally devel- 
oped in the folk-theatre. 

The great dramatists have ever been glad to 
accept the mould used by their immediate prede- 
cessors even though this mould was soon to be 
cracked by their purer metal and cast aside. 
Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere each of 
them inherited a traditional type of play and ac- 
cepted it unhesitatingly. Their mastery of their 



I2S ASPECTS OF FICTION 

art and their mightier endowment enabled them 
later to make over anew the traditional form 
they had assimilated early and to stamp it with 
their own image and superscription, and to pass 
it along to their successors enlarged and enriched. 
Like the architects of genius, these dramatists 
of genius began where their uninspired contem- 
poraries left off ; and probably the dramatists 
have felt the necessity of accepting the current 
traditional way of doing things, even more than 
the architects, for whereas the architect may be 
dependent only on a single patron, and may 
therefore persuade him to permit a violent de- 
parture from the customary practice, the drama- 
tists dare not risk anything freakish or abnormal 
since their appeal is to the public as a whole, 
and the public as a whole is unexpugnably con- 
servative. It is the privilege of the unliterary 
playmaker who provides the program of the 
folk-theatre to be educating a public for the 
later and more literary dramatist who is going 
to supersede him. As Froude puts it with his 
usual impressiveness — " No great general ever 
arose out of a nation of cowards ; no great 
statesman or philosopher out of a nation of 
fools ; no great artist out of a nation of materi- 
alists; no great dramatist except when the 
drama was the passion of the people." And it 



THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOLK-THEATRE 1 29 

ought to be evident that the drama can never 
become the passion of the people, unless the un- 
literary playwright of the folk-theatre has gone 
before, training the players, making ready the 
play-houses, and, above all, arousing the interest 
and expectancy of the public. 

To admit that the folk-theatre is important, 
to seek to learn how it had its being, to recog- 
nize that there are various stages of its devel- 
opment open to our study even at this late day, 
to spy out the secret of its power to please the 
people, to grasp the vital fact that the drama is 
something still alive and to be observed best in 
its living manifestations on the stage, to do 
these things is at least to make an effort to gain 
an understanding of the fundamental principles 
of the dramaturgic art. It is the obvious ab- 
sence of any such understanding, of any appre- 
ciation of the conditions under which plays are 
composed and produced, and of the reasons why 
they have succeeded or failed when actually 
acted in the theatre — it is the absence of this 
understanding and appreciation which vitiates 
so many of the scholarly attempts to elucidate 
the masterpieces of dramatic poetry. 

(1900.) 



TWO FRENCH THEATRICAL CRITICS 



[This pair of papers is here rescued from an earlier volume of 
1 Studies of the Stage,' now out of print.] 



TWO FRENCH THEATRICAL CRITICS 

L— M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 

To attempt a portrait of a man of letters after 
the subject has already sat to two limners as ac- 
complished as Mr. Henry James and M. Jules 
Lemaitre is venturesome and savors of conceit ; 
but nearly fifteen years have passed since Mr. 
James made his off-hand thumb-nail sketch of 
M. Sarcey, and M. Lemaitre's more recent and 
more elaborate portraiture in pastels was in- 
tended to be seen of Parisians only. Moreover, 
Mr. James, although he praises M. Sarcey, does 
so with many reserves, not to say a little grudg- 
ingly ; he even echoes the opinion once current 
in Paris, that M. Sarcey is heavy — an opinion 
which M. Lemaitre denounces and disproves. 

It is in person that M. Sarcey is heavy — in 
body, not in mind. He is portly and thick-set, 
but not thick-witted. He is short-sighted physi- 
cally, but no critic has keener insight. His judg- 
ments are as solid and as firm-footed as his 



134 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

tread. Sainte-Beuve has indicated the differ- 
ence between the "grave, learned, definitive" 
criticism which penetrates and explains and 
" the more alert and more lightly armed " criti- 
cism which gives the note to contemporary 
thought. It is in the former class, among the 
" grave, learned, definitive " critics, that M. Sar- 
cey must be placed, but his serious and elabo- 
rate decisions are expressed with perhaps as 
much liveliness and as much point as any one 
of the " more alert and more lightly armed " 
may display. M. Sarcey's wit is Voltairean in 
its quality, in its directness, and in its ease. 
Though his arm is strong to smite a cutting 
blow if need be, yet more often than not it is 
with the tip of the blade that he punctures his 
adversary, fighting fairly and breaking through 
the guard by skill of fence. 

And of fighting M. Sarcey has had his fill 
since he entered journalism, more than thirty 
years ago. Born in 1828, he was admitted to 
the Normal School in 1848 in the class with 
Taine and Edmond About. For seven years 
after his graduation, in 185 1, he served as a pro- 
fessor in several small towns, constantly involved 
in difficulties with the officials of the Second 
Empire. In 1858 he gave up the desk of the 
teacher for that of the journalist, and coming up 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 1 35 

to Paris by the aid and advice of About, he be- 
gan to write for the Figaro. The next year 
the Opinion Nationale was started, and M. Sar- 
cey became its dramatic critic. In 1867 he trans- 
ferred his services to the Temps, which is indis- 
putably the ablest and most dignified of all 
Parisian newspapers ; and to the Temps, in the 
number which bears the date of Monday and 
which appears on Sunday afternoon, M. Sarcey 
has contributed for now nearly a quarter of a 
century a weekly review of the theatres, slowly 
gaining in authority until for a score of years at 
least his primacy in Paris as a dramatic critic 
has been beyond question. 

In addition to this hebdomadal essay M. Sar- 
cey has descended daily into the thick of con- 
temporary polemics. He writes an article nearly 
every day on the topic of the hour. When About 
started the XIX e Siecle after the Prussian war, 
M. Sarcey was his chief editorial contributor, 
leading a lively campaign against administrative 
abuses of all kinds and exposing sharply the 
blunders of the ecclesiastical propaganda. He 
has little taste for party politics, which seem to 
him arid and fruitless ; but in the righting of 
wrongs he is indefatigable, and in the discussion 
of urban improvements, entering with ardor into 
all questions of water supplies, sewerage and the 



I36 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

like. And to the consideration of all these prob- 
lems he brings the broad common-sense, the 
stalwart logic, the robust energy which are his 
chief characteristics. He has common-sense in 
a most uncommon degree ; and its exercise might 
be monotonous if it were not enlivened by ironic 
and playful wit. 

Calling on him one day a few summers ago, 
and being hospitably received in the spacious 
library which his friend M. Charles Gamier, the 
architect of the Opera, has arranged for him in 
the wide-windowed studio of a house purchased 
by him from the painter who had built it for his 
own use, M. Sarcey told me that he was a lit- 
tle surprised to discover that such reputation as 
he might have outside of his own country was 
chiefly as a dramatic critic, whereas in France he 
was known rather as a working journalist. Sit- 
ting on the broad, square lounge below the wide 
window — the famous Divan Rouge of which M. 
Sarcey himself has told the legend in the pages 
of a French review — I suggested that perhaps 
this was owing to the merely local interest of 
the subjects the daily journalist was forced to 
deal with, while the Parisian dramatic critic dis- 
cussed plays, many of which were likely to be 
exported far beyond the boundaries of France 
and beyond the limits of the French language. 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 1 37 

I asked him also how it was that he had never 
made any collection of his dramatic criticisms, 
or even a selection from them, as Jules Janin 
and Theophile Gautier had done in the past, 
and as Auguste Vitu of the Figaro and M. Jules 
Lemaitre of the Debats had more recently at- 
tempted. 

I regret that I cannot recall the exact words 
of M. Sarcey's answer, although my recollection 
of the purport of his remarks is distinct enough. 
He said that he had not collected his weekly 
articles or even made a selection from them be- 
cause they were journalism and not literature : 
the essential difference between journalism and 
literature being that the newspaper is meant for 
the moment only, while the book is intended for 
all time, or as much of it as may be ; he wrote 
for the Temps his exact opinion at the minute 
of the writing, and having in view all the circum- 
stances of the hour. He said that in a book an 
author might be moderate in assertion, but that 
in a newspaper, which would be thrown away 
between sunrise and sunset, a writer at times 
must needs force the note; and when it was 
worth while, he must be ready to declare his 
opinion loudly, with insistence and with undue 
emphasis. Of this privilege he had availed him- 
self in the Temps, and this was one reason why 



I38 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

he did not wish to see his newspaper articles re- 
vived after they had their done work. (Here I 
feel it proper to note that a careful reading of M. 
Sarcey's feuilletons every week for now nearly 
fourteen years has shown me that although his 
enthusiasm may seem at times a little over- 
strained, it is never factitious and it is never for 
an unworthy object.) 

A second reason M. Sarcey gave for letting 
his dramatic criticisms remain in the back num- 
bers of a daily paper is that he always gave his 
opinion frankly and fully at the instant when his 
impressions crystallized, and that he sometimes 
changed these opinions when a play was revived 
or when a player was seen in a new part. " Now, 
if I reprinted my feuilletons," said he, laughing, 
" I should lose the right to contradict my- 
self." 

"To look at all sides," Lowell tells us, "and 
to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no 
doubt, the duty of a critic," but the hasty re- 
view of a play penned before sunrise, while the 
printer's boy waits for copy, is of necessity the 
verdict of a single mood ; and this is why M. 
Sarcey feels the need of keeping his mind open 
to fresh impressions, and of holding himself in 
readiness to modify his opinion if good cause is 
shown for a reversal of the previous decision. 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 1 39 

And the criticism to which Lowell refers is, in 
one sense, literature, while the rapid reviewing 
of contemporary art can never be more than 
journalism, tinctured always with the belief that 
what is essential is news — first its collection, and 
secondarily a comment upon it. 

In this same conversation with M. Sarcey in 
his library he told me that he had planned a 
book on the drama — 'A History of Theatrical 
Conventions' was to be its exact title, I think — 
but that he had done little or nothing toward 
it. The drama, like every other art, is based 
upon the passing of an implied agreement be- 
tween the public and the artist by which the 
former allows the latter certain privileges ; and in 
no art are these conventions more necessary and 
more obvious than in the art of the stage. The 
dramatist has but a few minutes in which to 
show his action, and he can take the spectator 
to but a few places ; therefore he has to select, 
to condense, to intensify beyond all nature ; and 
the spectator has to make allowances for the 
needful absence of the fourth wall of the room 
in which the scene passes, for the directness of 
speech, for the omission of the non-essentials 
which in real life cumber man's every movement. 
Certain of these conventions are permanent, im- 
mutable, inevitable, being of the essence of the 



140 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

contract, as we lawyers say, inherent in any con- 
ceivable form of dramatic art. Certain others are 
accidental, temporary, different in various coun- 
tries and in various ages. 

A history of theatrical conventions as M. Sar- 
cey might tell it would be the story of dramatic 
evolution and of the modification of the art of 
the stage in accord with the changing environ- 
ment ; it would be as vital and as pregnant and 
as stimulating a treatise on the drama and its 
essential principles as one could wish. I ex- 
pressed to M. Sarcey my eagerness to hold such 
a book in my hand as soon as might be. He 
laughed again heartily, and returned that he 
had made little progress, and that he was in no 
hurry to set forth his ideas nakedly by them- 
selves and systematically co-ordinated. " If I 
once formulated my theories," he said, "with 
what could I fill my feuilleton — those twelve 
broad columns of the Temps every week ?" 

What M. Sarcey has not yet done for him- 
self the late Becq de Fouquieres attempted in a 
book on ' L'Art de la Mise en Scene,' the princi- 
ples laid down in which are derived mainly from 
M. Sarcey 's essays in the Temps. M. de Fou- 
quieres, it is to be noted, had not M. Sarcey 's 
knowledge, his authority, his vigor, or his style, 
but his treatise is logical and valuable, and may 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 141 

be recommended heartily to all American stu- 
dents of the stage. 

That M. Sarcey should ever feel any difficulty 
in filling his allotted space is inconceivable to 
those who wonder weekly at his abundance, his 
variety, and his overflowing information. The 
post of dramatic critic has been held in Paris by 
many distinguished men, who for the most part 
regarded it with distaste and merely as a disa- 
greeable livelihood. Theophile Gautier was 
frequent in his denunciation of his theatrical 
servitude, speaking of himself as one toiling in 
the galley of journalism and chained to the oar 
of the feuilleton. In like manner Theodore de 
Banville and M. Francois Coppee cried aloud 
at their slavery, and sought every occasion for 
an excursus from the prescribed theatrical theme. 
Even M. Jules Lemaitre now and again strays 
from the path to discuss in the DJbats a. novel 
or a poem not strictly within the jurisdiction 
of the dramatic critic. M. Sarcey never faints 
in his allegiance to the stage, and he is never 
short of material for examination. If there are 
no novelties at the theatres, there may be new 
books about the stage. Or if these fail there 
are questions of theatrical administration. Or, 
in default of everything else, the Comedie-Fran- 
caise is always open, and in the dull days of the 



142 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

summer it acts the older plays, the comedies 
and tragedies of the classical repertory, and in 
these M. Sarcey finds many a peg on which to 
hang a disquisition on dramatic esthetics. I will 
not say that I have not found the same truth 
presented more than once in the seven hundred 
of M. Sarcey's weekly essays that I have read 
and preserved, or the same moral enforced more 
than once ; but that is a pretty poor truth which 
will not bear more than one repetition. 

Perhaps the first remark a regular reader of 
M. Sarcey's weekly review finds himself making 
is that the critic has a profound knowledge of 
the art of the stage. Of a certainty the second 
is to the effect that the critic very evidently de- 
lights in his work, is obviously glad to go to the 
theatre and pleased to express his opinion on 
the play and the performance. No dramatic 
critic was ever more conscientious than M. Sar- 
cey, none was ever as indefatigable. Often he 
returns to see a piece a second time before re- 
cording his opinion in print, ready to modify 
his first impression and quick to note the effect 
produced on the real public, the broad body of 
average play-goers but sparsely represented on 
first nights. 

Next to his enjoyment of his work and his 
conscience in the discharge of his duty, the chief 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 1 43 

characteristic of M. Sarcey is his extraordinary- 
knowledge, his wide acquaintance with the his- 
tory of the theatre in Greece, in Rome, and in 
France, his close hold on the thread of dramatic 
development, and his firm grasp of the vital 
principles of theatric art. He understands as 
no one else the theory of the drama, the why 
and the wherefore of every cog-wheel of dramatic 
mechanism. He seizes the beauty of technical 
detail, and he is fond of making this plain to 
the ordinary play-goer, who is conscious solely 
of the result and careless of the means. He has 
a marvellous faculty of seizing the central situa- 
tion of a play and of setting this forth boldly, 
dwelling on the subsidiary developments of the 
plot only in so far as they are needful for the 
proper exposition of the more important point. 
By directing all the light on this dominating 
and culminating situation, the one essential and 
pregnant part of the piece, M. Sarcey manages 
to convey to the reader some notion of the effect 
of the acted play upon the audience — a task far 
above the calibre of the ordinary theatrical crit- 
ics, who content themselves generally with a 
hap-hazard and hasty summary of the plot, bald 
and barren. From M. Sarcey's criticism of a 
play in Paris it is possible for an intelligent 
reader in New York to appreciate the effect of 



144 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

the performance and to understand the causes 
of its success or its failure. 

His criticism — even when one is most in dis- 
agreement with his opinions — is always in formed 
with an exact appreciation of the possibilities 
and the limitations of the acted drama. Here 
is M. Sarcey's real originality as a theatrical 
critic — that he criticises the acted drama as 
something to be acted. With the possible ex- 
ception of Lessing — whom he once praised to 
me most cordially, declaring that he was de- 
lighted whenever he took down the ' Drama- 
turgic ' and chanced upon some dictum of the 
great German critic confirmatory of one of his 
own theories — with the exception of Lessing 
and of G. H. Lewes, M. Sarcey is the first mod- 
ern dramatic critic of literary equipment who 
did not consider a tragedy or a comedy merely 
as literature and apart from its effect when acted. 
La Harpe and Geoffroy might have contented 
themselves with reading at home the plays they 
criticised for all the effect of the performance to 
be detected in their comment. Janin and Gau- 
tier were little better : to them a drama was a 
specimen of literature, to be judged by the rules 
and methods applicable to other specimens of 
literature. 

Now, no view could be more unjust to the 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 1 45 

dramatist. A play is written not to be read, 
primarily, but to be acted ; and if it is a good 
play it is seen to fullest advantage only when it 
is acted. M. Coquelin has recently pointed out 
that if Shakspere and Moliere, the greatest 
two dramatists that ever lived, were both care- 
less as to the printing of their plays, it was per- 
haps because both knew that these plays were 
written for the theatre, and that only in the 
theatre could they be judged properly. Seen by 
the light of the lamps a play has quite another 
complexion from that it bears in the library. 
Passages pale and dull, it may be, when read 
coldly by the eye, are lighted by the inner fire 
of passion when presented in the theatre ; and 
the solid structure of action, without which a 
drama is naught, may stand forth in bolder re- 
lief on the stage. A play in the hand of the 
reader and a play before the eye of the spec- 
tator are two very different things ; and the dif- 
ference between them bids fair to grow apace 
with the increasing attention paid nowadays to 
the purely pictorial side of dramatic art, to the 
costumes and the scenery, to the illustrative 
business and the ingenious management of the 
lights. No one knows better than M. Sarcey 
how sharp the difference is between the play on 
the stage and the play in the closet, and no one 



146 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

has indicated the distinction with more acumen. 
He judges the play before him as it impresses 
him and the surrounding play-goers at its per- 
formance in the theatre, and not as it might 
strike him on perusal alone in his study. 

And this is one reason why — if it were neces- 
sary to declare the order of the critical hierarchy 
— I should rank M. Sarcey as a critic of the 
acted drama more highly than any British critic 
even of the great days of British dramatic criti- 
cism, when Lamb and Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt 
were practitioners of the art. The task of Haz- 
litt and of Leigh Hunt was far different from 
M. Sarcey's. The English drama of their day 
was so feeble that few except professed students 
of theatrical history can now recall the names 
of any play or of any playwright of that time ; 
and therefore the critics devoted themselves al- 
most altogether to an analysis of the beauties of 
Shakspere and of the art of acting as revealed 
by John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and Ed- 
mund Kean. Lamb's subtle and paradoxical 
essays are retrospective, the best of them, and 
commemorate performers and performances held 
in affectionate remembrance. He wrote little 
about the actual present, and thus he avoided 
the double difficulty of dramatic criticism as M. 
Sarcey has to meet it to-day in France. 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 1 47 

This double difficulty is, that when the dra- 
matic critic has to review a new play he is called 
upon to do two things at once, each incompati- 
ble with the other: he has to judge the play, 
which he knows only through the medium of 
the acting, and he has to judge the acting, which 
he knows only as it is shown in the play ; and 
thus there is a double liability to error. Neither 
the dramatist nor the comedian stands before 
the critic simply and directly — each can be seen 
only as the other is able and willing to declare 
him. It may be said that the dramatic critic 
does not see a new play — he sees only a per- 
formance, and this performance maybe good or 
bad, may betray the author or reinforce him, 
may be fairly representative of his work and his 
wishes, or may not. It is not the play itself that 
the critic sees — it is only the performance. If the 
play is in print, the critic may correct the im- 
pression of the single representation, or he may 
do so if the play be revived. Lamb and Hazlitt 
and Leigh Hunt, dealing almost wholly with the 
comedies and tragedies of the past, all of which 
were in print and in their possession for quiet 
perusal, had a far easier task than M. Sarcey's — 
they had to do little more than comment upon 
the acting or express their pre-existing opinion of 
the play itself. M. Sarcey has to judge both 



I48 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

piece and the acting at the same time, and he 
has to judge the piece solely through the me- 
dium of the acting, and the acting solely through 
the medium of the piece ; and it may happen 
that either medium refracts irregularly. Every 
actor, every dramatic author, every theatrical 
manager knows that there are " ungrateful parts " 
and "parts that play themselves." Out of the 
former the best actor can make but little, and in 
the latter the defects of even the poorest actor 
are disguised. 

No dramatic critic is better aware of this 
double difficulty than M. Sarcey, and no one is 
more adroit in solving it. As far as natural 
gifts and an unprecedented experience can avail, 
he avoids the danger. He is open-minded, slow 
to formulate his opinion, and always ready to 
give a play or a player a rehearing. He is 
never mean, never morose, never malignant. 
He is not one of the critics who attack a living 
author with the callous carelessness with which 
an anatomist goes to work on a nameless ca- 
daver. He is no more easy to please than any 
other expert whose taste is fine, though his sym- 
pathies are broad ; but when he is pleased he is 
emphatic in praise. It was in the ' Idle Man/ in 
his wonderful panegyric of Kean's acting, that 
Dana said, " I hold it to be a low and wicked 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 1 49 

thing to keep back from merit of any kind its 
due " ; and M. Sarcey is of Dana's opinion. He 
is capable of dithyrambic rhapsodies of eulogy 
when he is trying to warm up the Parisian pub- 
lic to a proper appreciation of M. Meilhac's 
' Gotte ' or ' Decore,' for example ; and although 
nobody can love New York more than I do, 
sometimes one of the Temps reviews of a new 
play at the Vaudeville, of a revival at the Odeon, 
or of a first appearance at the Francais is enough 
to make me homesick for Paris. 

As a critic even of the drama, M. Sarcey has 
his limitations. He is now and then insular — 
Paris (like New York) had its origin on an 
island. At times he is dogmatic to the verge of 
despotism. He has the defects of his qualities; 
and the first of his qualities is a robust com- 
mon-sense, which is sometimes a little common- 
place and sometimes again a little overwhelm- 
ing, a little intolerant. Common-sense is an old 
failing of the French. " We have almost all of 
us," says M. Jules Lemaitre, " more or less Mal- 
herbe, Boileau, Voltaire, and M. Thiers in our 
marrow." A characteristic of all these typical 
Frenchmen was pugnacity, and this is one of M. 
Sarcey's most valuable qualities. He fights fair, 
but he fights hard. His long campaign against 
M. Duquesnel as the manager of the Odeon and 



150 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

his repeated attacks on the theories of the late 
M. Perrin, until the death of that administrator 
of the Comedie-Francaise, are memorable in- 
stances of M. Sarcey's tenacity. They are in- 
stances also of his sagacity, for time has proved 
the truth of his contentions. Again, when M. 
Zola made a bitter and personal retort to a plain- 
spoken criticism, M. Sarcey returned an answer 
as good-tempered as any one could wish, but as 
convincing and as cutting as any of M. Zola's 
many opponents could desire. When M. Sarcey 
picks up the gauntlet, he handles his adversary 
without gloves. 

In the reply to M. Zola, as elsewhere, M. Sar- 
cey confessed his abiding weakness— the incura- 
ble habit of heterophemy which makes him mis- 
call names in almost every article he writes, 
setting down " Edmond " when it should be 
"Edward," and the like. But blunders of this 
sort are but trifles which any alert proof-reader 
might check, and which every careful reader can 
correct for himself. They are all of a piece with 
M. Sarcey's writing, which abounds in familiari- 
ties, in slang, in the technical terms of the stage, 
in happy-go-lucky allusions often exceedingly 
felicitous, and in frequent anecdotes from his 
wide reading or from his own experience. The 
result is a style of transparent ease and of indis- 



M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 151 

putable sincerity. Nobody was ever in doubt 
as to his meaning at any time, or in doubt as to 
the reason why he meant what he said. To this 
sincerity M. Sarcey referred in his reply to M. 
Zola, and to it he owes, as he there declared, 
much of his authority as a dramatic critic. With 
the public, intelligence and knowledge count for 
much, and skill tells also, and so does wit ; but 
nothing is as important to a critic as a repu- 
tation for integrity, for frankness, for absolute 
honesty in the expression of his opinions. 

To keep this reputation quite free from sus- 
picion M. Sarcey declined to solicit the chair of 
Emile Augier in the French Academy. In a 
dignified and pathetic letter to the public, he 
declared that although he believed that most of 
the dramatists who belonged to the Forty Im- 
mortals would vote for him, and although he 
believed that both before his candidacy and 
after his election he could criticise the plays 
of these dramatists as freely as he did now, yet 
he did not believe that the public would credit 
him with this fortitude. " The authority of 
the critic lies in the confidence of the public," 
he wrote; and if the public doubted whether 
he would speak the truth and the whole truth 
as frankly after he had been a candidate or after 
he had become an Academician, his opinion 



152 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

would lose half its weight. To guard his free- 
dom he told me once he had refused all honors, 
even the cross of the Legion of Honor. He de- 
clared in this letter that he hesitated long, and 
that he knew the sacrifice he was making. If 
journalism had been without a representative in 
the Academy, perhaps he might have felt it his 
duty to be a candidate, but John Lemoine was 
one of the Forty, and there were already two 
or three other journalists drawing nigh to the 
Academy, "who will fill most brilliantly the 
place I give up to them." He concluded by 
declaring that his ambition was to have on his 
tombstone the two words which would sum up 
his career — " Professor and Journalist." 

(1890.) 



II.— M. JULES LEMAITRE 

In the evolution of literature three kinds of 
critics have been developed. First in point of 
time came the critic who spoke as one having 
authority, who appealed to absolute standards 
of taste, who had no doubt as to the force of his 
criterions, who judged according to the strict 
letter of the law, and who willingly advised a 
poet to put his Pegasus out to grass or ordered 
a writer of prose to send his stalking-horse to 
the knacker. This critic believed in definite 
legislation for literature, and sometimes — when 
his name was Horace or Boileau or Pope — he 
codified the scattered laws, that all might obey 
them understandingly. Macaulay was perhaps 
the last British critic of this class; and even 
now many of his minor imitators hand down 
their hebdomadal judgments in the broad col- 
umns of British weeklies. In France there is 
to-day a man of force, acuteness, and individu- 
ality, M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, who accepts 
this earlier creed of criticism, and who acts up 
to it conscientiously in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes. 



154 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

The papal infallibility of the Essay on Criti- 
cism began to be doubted toward the end of the 
last century. Lessing, for one, had impulses of 
revolt against the rigidity of the rules by which 
literature was limited ; but the German protest 
of the Schlegels, for instance, was rather against 
the restrictions of French criticism than against 
a narrow method of appreciating poetry. Like 
the Irish clergyman who declared himself will- 
ing to "renounce the errors of the Church of 
Rome and to adopt those of the Church of Eng- 
land," most of the writers who refused to be 
judged by the precepts of Classicism were ready 
to apply with equal rigor the rules of Romanti- 
cism. But in time, out of the welter and strug- 
gle of faction came a perception of a new truth 
— that it is the task of the critic not to judge, 
but to examine, to inquire, to investigate, to see 
the object as it really is and to consider it with 
disinterested curiosity. This Sainte-Beuve at- 
tempted, though even he did not always attain 
to the lofty ideal he proclaimed ; and to the 
same chilly height Matthew Arnold tried to 
reach, saying that he wished to decide nothing 
as of his " own authority ; the great art of crit- 
icism is to get one's self out of the way and to 
let humanity decide." 

The phrase which Dr. Waldstein quoted from 



M. JULES LEMAITRE 1 55 

Spinoza not long ago as characteristic of the 
scientific mind — Neque flere, neque rider e, neque 
admirare, neque contemnere, sed intelligere 
(Neither to weep nor to laugh, neither to ad- 
mire nor to despise, but to understand) — this 
may serve to indicate the aim of scientific criti- 
cism which judges not, which expresses no opin- 
ions, which does not take sides, which merely 
sets down, with the arid precision of an affidavit, 
the facts as these are revealed by a qualitative 
analysis. Unfortunately, criticism as impersonal 
as this is impossible; no man can make a mere 
machine of himself to register in vacuo. "If 
there were any recognized standard in criticism, 
as in apothecaries' measure, so that, by adding 
a grain of praise to this scale or taking away a 
scruple of blame from that, we could make the 
balance manifestly even in the eyes of all men, 
it might be worth while to weigh Hannibal," 
Mr. Lowell tells us; "but when each of us 
stamps his own weights and warrants the im- 
partiality of his own scales, perhaps the experi- 
ment may be wisely foregone." 

The natural reaction from an impossibly cal- 
lous scientific criticism which sought to sup- 
press the personality of the critic was a criticism 
which was frankly individual. This is the third 
kind of criticism ; it abdicates all inherited au- 



156 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

thority and it does not pretend to scientific ex- 
actitude. It recognizes that no standard is final, 
and that there is no disputing about tastes. It 
is aware that in the higher criticism as in the 
higher education there has been an abolition of 
the marking system, and that the critic is no 
longer a pedant or a pedagogue sending one 
author up to the head of his class and setting 
another in the corner with a fool's cap on his 
brow. It declares the honest impression of the 
individual at the moment of writing, not con- 
cealing the fact that even this may be different 
at another time. In reality Poe was a critic of 
this type, though he lacked frankness, and with 
characteristic charlatanry was prompt to appeal 
to the immutable standards to verify his own 
vagaries. 

The three types of criticism have been evolved 
inevitably one out of the other; and the devel- 
opment of the third kind has not driven out 
the practitioners of the first and second. Critics 
of all three classes exist at present side by side 
in France, England, and America, disputing to- 
gether daily in the schools. Yet the man is of 
more importance than the method ; and a born 
critic can bend any theory of his art to suit his 
purpose. Boileau and Sainte-Beuve were both 
good critics, and Matthew Arnold was a good 



M. JULES LEMAITRE 1 57 

critic ; and so was Lowell, who seemed rather 
an eciectic, not firm in following any one creed. 
To which theory a man gives in allegiance now- 
adays is mainly a question of temperament. In 
France, as it happens, the most brilliant critic 
of the younger generation, M. Jules Lemaitre, 
belongs to the third class. M. Lemaitre is a tri- 
umphant exemplar of individual criticism, giv- 
ing his opinions for what they are worth, and 
presenting them so forcibly, so picturesquely, 
so pleasantly, that at least they are always 
worth listening to. There is no pose in his 
frankness, and his apparent inconsequence is 
open and honest. 

In some respects M. Jules Lemaitre is a typ- 
ical Frenchman of letters. He has the ease, 
the grace, the wit, the lightness of touch, and 
the certainty of execution characteristic of the 
best French authors. Behind these charms he 
has the love of clearness, of order, of symmetry 
— in a word, of form — which is among the most 
marked of French qualities. He dislikes ex- 
travagance of any kind ; he hates harshness, 
violence, brutality. He inherits the Latin tra- 
dition, and he has fed fat on the poetry of 
Greece and Rome. He has none of the liking 
of his contemporary, M. Paul Bourget, for for- 
eign countries, and none of M. Bourget's cu- 



158 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

riosity as to foreign literature. M. Lemaitre is 
content to have M. "Pierre Loti " do his trav- 
elling for him, or to let Guy de Maupassant go 
abroad as his proxy. 

M. Jules Lemaitre has not yet "come to forty 
years." He is still a young man. He was born 
in 1853, in the little village of Vennecy, on the 
edge of the forest of Orleans. He attended 
school at Orleans and then in Paris, and when 
he was nineteen he entered the Normal School, 
which of late years has given many a brilliant 
man to French literature. In 1875, at the age 
of twenty-two, he was graduated from the Nor- 
mal School with high honors, and he was at 
once sent to the Lycee of Havre as professor of 
rhetoric. Here he stayed five years teaching, 
and yet finding time to write that first volume 
of verse with which most authors begin their 
literary career. 

In 1880 he published these poems, and in the 
same year he was promoted and sent to Algiers. 
In 1883 he brought out a second book of 
rhymes, and he presented his double theses to 
the Sorbonne, whereupon he was made a doctor 
of letters. The thesis in French, a study of the 
plays of Dancourt and of the course of French 
comedy after the death of Moliere, was quite 
unconventional in its individuality, as any one 



M. JULES LEMAfTRE 159 

may see now that it has been published. He 
was again promoted, but he already thought of 
giving up his professorship to venture into lit- 
erature. In 1884 he asked for leave of absence 
and went to Paris, where he began to contribute 
regularly to the Revue Bleue, the most literary 
and the most independent of French weekly 
journals — as far as may be the Parisian equiv- 
alent of the Nation. In a very few weeks he 
made his name known to all the Parisians who 
care for literature. His acute analysis of Renan 
was the first of his essays to attract general at- 
tention ; and when he followed this up with 
equally incisive studies of M. Zola and of M. 
Georges Ohnet, he was at once accepted as one 
of the most acute of contemporary French crit- 
ics. As one of his biographers declares, " He 
was unknown in October, 1884, and in Decem- 
ber he was famous." A few months later, when 
J. J. Weiss resigned, M. Lemaitre was appoint- 
ed dramatic critic of the Journal des De'bats, 
the position long held by Jules Janin. 

His contributions to the Revue Bleue M. Le- 
maitre has four times gathered into volumes 
sent forth under the same title, * Les Contempo- 
rains.' Selections from his weekly articles in 
the Debats have also been collected in succes- 
sive volumes called ' Impressions de Theatre.' 



l6o ASPECTS OF FICTION 

The titles he has given to these two series of 
his criticisms reveal the aim of M. Lemaitre and 
his range. Those whom he criticises are chief- 
ly his contemporaries, or at furthest those who 
have deeply and immediately influenced the 
men of to-day ; and the criticisms themselves 
are chiefly his impressions. M. Lemaitre is a 
man of the nineteenth century, first of all, and 
he tells his fellow-men how the books and the 
plays of the nineteenth century, the authors and 
the actors, affect him, how they move him — in 
short, how they impress him at the moment re- 
gardless of any change of opinion which may 
come to him in the future. 

Sainte-Beuve protests against those who bor- 
row ready-made opinions; and it must be ad- 
mitted that more often than not a ready-made 
opinion is a misfit. M. Jules Lemaitre has his 
opinions made to measure, and as soon as he 
outgrows them they are cast aside. While he 
wears them they are his own, and not in cut, 
nor cloth, nor style are they commonplace. 
He has the double qualification of the true 
critic — insight and equipment. He has humor 
and good-humor, and he enjoys the play of his 
own wit. He is a scholar who is often as lively 
and as lawless as a schoolboy. He is at once a 
man of letters and a man of the world. He 



M. JULES LEMAITRE l6l 

hates the smell of the lamp, and his best work 
has the flavor of the good talk that may go up 
the chimney when there is a wood fire on the 
hearth. As he gained experience and authority 
he has become less emphatic, and he hesitates 
more before coming to definite conclusions. 
The certainty of conviction which he brought 
with him from the provinces has given way to 
a more Parisian scepticism. His earlier crit- 
icisms were all solidly constructed and stood 
four-square. Renan, M. Georges Ohnet, and 
M. Zola were never in any doubt as to his final 
opinion. 

The later criticisms are more individual, 
more " personal " — as the French say — more 
impressionist, than the earlier. M. Lemaitre is 
quite aware that the shield is silver on one side 
and gold on the other, and he is no longer will- 
ing to break a lance for either metal, whichever 
may be nearer to him. He is open-minded, he 
sees both sides at once, and he sets down both 
the pro and the con, sometimes declining to ex- 
press his own ultimate opinion, sometimes even 
refusing to form any opinion at all. He is fond 
of setting up a man of straw to act as the dev- 
il's advocate; but though this insures a full 
hearing of the witnesses for the defence as well 
as for the prosecution, it rarely prevents M. 



1 62 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Lemaitre from getting his saint, after all, when 
he is resolute for the beatification. Now and 
again he seems indifferent, and he remains " on 
the fence," as we Yankees say, or rather on both 
sides of it at once. His attitude then is that of 
a lazy judge leaving the whole burden of decis- 
ion on the jury. Yet when his opinion is clear 
and simple he is prompt enough, as the es- 
says on M. Daudet's ' Immortel,' M. Zola's 
* Reve,' Victor Hugo's ' Toute la Lyre,' in the 
fourth series, show plainly. This is evidence, 
were any needed, that behind the hesitation and 
the apparent indifference there is a live interest 
in literature, a real love for what is true, gen- 
uine, hearty, and a sharp hatred for shams. 

His hatred of shams is shown in his swift 
condemnation of M. Georges Ohnet's romances, 
perhaps unduly ferocious in manner, although 
indisputably deserved. M. Georges Ohnet is 
the most popular of French novelists ; his sto- 
ries sell by the hundred thousand, and he occu- 
pies the place in France which the late E. P. 
Roe held in America, and which Mr. Rider 
Haggard holds now in England. There had 
been a general silence in the French press about 
M. Ohnet's novels ; no one praised them highly, 
but they pleased the public — or, at least, the 
half-educated and really illiterate mass of novel 



M. JULES LEMAITRE 1 63 

readers. M. Lemaitre felt the revolt of a schol- 
ar of refined tastes and delicate instincts against 
the overpowering popularity of M. Ohnet's 
empty triviality, and in a memorable article he 
" belled the cat " and he " rang the bell." Never 
was such an execution since Macaulay slew 
Montgomery. M. Lemaitre began by saying 
that he was in the habit of discussing literary 
subjects, but he hoped that he would be par- 
doned if he spoke now of the novels of M. 
Georges Ohnet ; and then he went on to hold 
up to scorn the feeble style of M. Ohnet, the 
merely mechanical structure of his stories, the 
conventionality of his characters and their falsity 
to humanity, the barren absurdity of his philos- 
ophy of life and the baseness of his appeal to 
the prejudices of the middle class, wherein he 
sought for readers. In general, M. Lemaitre is 
keen of fence, and his weapon is the small sword 
of the duelling field ; but to M. Ohnet he took 
a single-stick or a quarter-staff, and with this 
he beat his victim black and blue, breaking 
more than one bone. 

Longfellow tells us that "a young critic is 
like a boy with a gun ; he fires at every living 
thing he sees ; he thinks only of his own skill, 
not of the pain he is giving." M. Lemaitre was 
a young critic when he wrote this crushing as- 



164 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

sault on M. Ohnet. Since then he has never 
attempted to repeat the experience ; it is true 
that there is in France to-day no other subject as 
good as M. Ohnet for a severe critic to try his 
hand on. Of late when M. Lemaitre has had 
to express a hostile opinion he has been more 
indirect ; and now he draws blood by a dexter- 
ous insinuation adroitly thrust under his adver- 
sary's sword arm. Ill-disguised was his con- 
tempt for Albert Wolff, a Parisian from Cologne, 
a writer of chroniques for the Figaro — most 
perishable of all articles de Paris — one who is 
to journalism what M. Georges Ohnet is to lit- 
erature. Ill-disguised is his condemnation of 
the part M. Henri Rochefort has played in the 
French politics of the past quarter of a century, 
and bitterly incisive — corrosive almost — is the 
outline he etches of the character of the man 
with the immitigable grin, the man whose 
Lanterne helped to light the fall of the second 
empire, the man who has since egged on every 
revolt, however bloody, however hopeless, how- 
ever foolish. 

Of these adverse criticisms there are very few 
indeed — a scant half-dozen, perhaps — in the 
threescore essays contained in volumes of ' Les 
Contemporains.' This is as it should be, for he 
is a very narrow critic indeed who deals more 



M. JULES LEMAfTRE 1 65 

in blame than in praise. For criticism to be 
profitable and pregnant, the critic must needs 
dwell on the works he admires. Merely neg- 
ative criticism is sterile. The late Edmond 
Scherer said that " the ideal of criticism was to 
be able to praise cordially and with enthusiasm, 
if need be, without losing one's head or getting 
blind to defects." 

Nothing is more needful for a critic than sym- 
pathy with his subject. The faculty of appre- 
ciation, of hearty admiration, of contagious en- 
thusiasm even, is among the best gifts of a true 
critic ; and this M. Lemaitre has in abundance. 
He likes the best and the best only, but this he 
likes superlatively. And he can see the good 
points even of authors who do not altogether 
please him ; and these he is always ready to 
laud in hearty fashion. 

" Readers like to find themselves more severe 
than the critic ; and I let them have this pleas- 
ure," said Sainte-Beuve. M. Lemaitre goes far 
beyond his great predecessor ; he delights in 
broad eulogy of those who appeal to his delicate 
sense of the exquisite in literary art. His en- 
joyment of " Pierre Loti," for example, of M. 
Daudet's ' Nabab,' of Renan, is so intense that he 
is swept off his feet by the strong current of ad- 
miration. But though he lose his feet he keeps 



1 66 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

his head, and in his highest raptures he is never 
uncritical. What M. Lemaitre likes best, if not 
always the books best worth liking, are always 
at least books well worth liking; and he likes 
them for what is best in them, and never for 
their affectations, their superfluities, their con- 
tortions ; and it is for these often that many a 
critic pretends to worship a master. M. Le- 
maitre's taste is keen and fine and sure ; and his 
judgment is solid. 

Although M. Lemaitre knows his classics — 
Greek, Latin, and French — as becomes a Nor- 
ntalien, he likes French literature better than 
Greek or Latin ; and he likes the French liter- 
ature of the nineteenth century better than that 
of the eighteenth, or even of the seventeenth. 
It is his contemporaries who most interest him. 
In his clear and subtle and respectful analysis 
of the characteristics of his fellow-critic M. 
Ferdinand Brunetiere, M. Lemaitre confesses 
that while he reads Bossuet and acknowledges 
the power of that most eloquent of orators, yet 
the reading gives him little pleasure, " whereas 
often on opening by chance a book of to-day or 
of yesterday " he thrills with delight ; and he 
calls on M. Brunetiere to set off one century 
against the other. " If, perhaps, Corneille, Ra- 
cine, Bossuet have no equivalents to-day, had 



M. JULES LEMAITRE 1 67 

the great century the equivalent of Lamartine, 
of Victor Hugo, of Musset, of Michelet, of 
George Sand, of Sainte-Beuve, of Flaubert, of 
M. Renan ? And is it my fault if I would rath- 
er read a chapter of M. Renan than a sermon 
of Bossuet, the ' Nabab ' than the ' Princess of 
Cleves,' and a certain comedy of Meilhac and 
Hale"vy even than a comedy of Moliere ?" 

It is this, I think, which gives to M. Le- 
maitre's criticism much of its value — his intense 
liking for the French literature of to-day, and 
his perfect understanding of its moods and of 
its methods. He has an extraordinary dex- 
terity in plucking out the heart of technical 
mysteries. In considering a little book of say- 
ings he took occasion to declare the theory of 
maxim-making, whereby every man may be his 
own La Rochefoucauld, and he supplied an 
abundance of bright examples manufactured 
according to his new formulas. In like manner 
he discovered the trick of the rhythms and 
rhymes of Theodore de Banville, the reviver of 
the rondeau and of the ballade, and a past- 
master of verbal jugglery and of acrobatic verse. 

In peering into the methods of more impor- 
tant literary workmen he is equally keen. 
Take, for example, his study of M. Zola — per- 
haps the most acute and the most respectful 



1 68 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

analysis of M. Zola's very remarkable powers to 
be found anywhere ; more elaborate than the 
excellent essay written by Mr. Henry James 
when ' Nana' was published. M.Zola is a nov- 
elist with a theory of his art violently promul- 
gated and turbulently reiterated until most peo- 
ple were ready to accept his own word for his 
work, and to regard his romances as examples of 
the Naturalism he proclaimed. Now and then 
an adverse critic dwelt on the inconsistencies 
between M. Zola's theory and his practice, and 
M. Zola himself bemoaned the occasional sur- 
vivals of the Romanticist spirit he detected in 
himself. M. Lemaitre began by thrusting this 
aside, and by painting M. Zola in his true col- 
ors with a bold sweep of the brush. "M. 
Zola," he declared, "is not a critic, and he is 
not a Naturalistic novelist in the meaning he 
himself gives to the term. But M. Zola is an 
epic poet and a pessimistic poet. . . . By 
poet I mean a writer who in virtue of an idea 
. . . notably transforms reality, and having 
so transformed it gives it life." M. Lemaitre 
then shows us the simple but powerful mechan- 
ism of M. Zola's art — how he takes a theme and 
sets it before the reader with broad strokes 
and with typical characters boldly differentiated 
and reduced almost to their elements, but none 



M. JULES LEMAITRE 1 69 

the less alive. Space fails here to show how M. 
Lemaitre works out most convincingly the sub- 
stantial identity of M. Zola's massive method 
with that of the epic poet, and how he discov- 
ers in every one of M. Zola's later fictions a 
Beast, a huge symbol of the theme which that 
story sets forth, and a Chorus which comments 
upon the events and brings them nearer to the 
reader. 

The essay may be recommended to all who 
have a taste for criticism ; I know nothing at 
once more acute, more original, or truer. It 
may be recommended especially to those who 
would like to know what manner of writer M. 
Zola is, and who yet shrink from the reading of 
his novels, often drawn out and wearisome, and 
nearly always foul and repulsive. It is M. 
Zola's misfortune — and it is indubitably his 
own fault — that he is judged by hearsay often, 
and that his books are taken as the types of 
filthy fiction. Perhaps he is more frequently 
condemned than read — although sometimes the 
British abuse of his books has struck me as the 
reaction of guilty enjoyment. Occasion serves 
to say in parentheses here that while M. Zola's 
forcible and effective novels are painful often, 
while they are dirty frequently and indefensi- 
bly, they are not immoral. It is rather in Oc- 



170 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

tave Feuillet's rose-colored novels or in M. 
Georges Ohnet's gilt-edged fictions that we 
may seek insidious immorality. 

M. Lemaitre indicates the misplaced dirt in 
M. Zola's novels, and obviously enough is him- 
self a man of clean mind ; but perhaps he lacks 
the inherent sternness of morality which in a 
man of Anglo-Saxon stock would go with an 
upright character like his. He has a respect- 
ful regard for the Don Juan of Moliere and of 
Mozart, of Byron and of Musset ; and he has 
a kindly tolerance for the disciples of Don Juan 
who infest French literature. 

M. Lemaitre's dramatic criticisms, his ' Im- 
pressions de Theatre ' are quite as original as 
his more solid literary portraits, quite as fresh, 
quite as individual, quite as amusing. He 
lacks the profound knowledge of the con- 
ditions of dramatic art, the extraordinary in- 
sight into the necessary conventions upon 
which it is based, the thorough acquaintance 
with the history of the theatre in France, 
which have given to the foremost theatrical 
critic of our time, M. Francisque Sarcey, his 
unexampled authority. But he looks at the 
stage always through his own eyes, never 
through the opera-glass of his neighbor or the 
spectacles of tradition. He is fond of the the- 



M. JULES LEMAITRE 171 

atre, and yet he readily goes outside of its walls, 
and considers not merely the technic of the 
dramatist but also the ethics. Like most well- 
equipped and keen-witted critics, his criticism 
willingly broadens its vision to consider life as 
well as literature. Of the conventionalities 
and the concessions to chance which the writer 
of comedy avails himself freely, M. Lemaitre 
is tolerant, and wisely; but he is intolerant and 
implacable toward the false psychology and the 
defective ethics of the mere playwright who 
twists characters and misrepresents humanity to 
gain an effect. 

The critic of the DJbats is not content with 
describing the dramas of the leading theatres of 
Paris ; he has a Thackerayan fondness for spec- 
tacles of all kinds, for the ballet, for the circus 
and the pantomime, for side-shows, for freaks 
of every degree. In all these he finds unfailing 
amusement and an unflagging variety of im- 
pressions. He is always alert, lively, gay ; and 
though he travels far afield, he is never at his 
wits' end. In his dramatic criticisms M. Le- 
maitre appears to me as a serious student of 
literature and of life, playing the part of a Pa- 
risian — and it is a most excellent impersona- 
tion. 

Of M. Lemaitre's poems, there is no need to 



172 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

say anything ; they are the verses of a very 
clever man, no doubt, but not those of a born 
poet. They shine with the reflected light of 
his work in prose. Gray thought " even a bad 
verse as good a thing or better than the best 
observation that ever was made upon it ; " but 
even fairly good verse is not as good a thing 
as the best observation that ever was made on 
the best verse. It is to the prose and not to 
the verse of Lessing and of Sainte-Beuve that 
we turn, again and again. 

Of M. Lemaitre's stories there is no need to 
say much : they are the tales of a very clever 
man, of course, but not those of a born teller of 
tales. They lack a something vague and inde- 
finable — a flavor, a perfume, an aroma of vital- 
ity; it is as though they were a manufacture, 
rather, and not a growth. They are not inev- 
itable enough. They are naif without being 
quite convincing. They have simplicity of mo- 
tive, harmony of construction, sharpness of out- 
line, touches of melancholy and pathos, unfail- 
ing ingenuity and wit — and yet — and yet — Of 
the stories contained in the beautifully illus- 
trated volume called ' Dix Contes ' only three or 
four are modern, and even these seem to have a 
hint of allegory as though there were perhaps a 
concealed moral somewhere. The rest are tales 



M. JULES LEMAfTRE 1 73 

of once-upon-a-time, in Arabia, in Greece, in 
Rome, as dissimilar as possible from the contes 
of M. Daudet or of Maupassant, of M. Coppee 
or of M. Halevy, and with a certain likeness to 
the ' Contes Philosophiques ' of Voltaire. To 
say this is to suggest that they are rather fables, 
apologues, allegories, than short-stories. 

Of M. Lemaitre's play, ' Revoltee,' there is no 
need to say more ; it is the comedy of a very 
clever man indeed, but not that of a born play- 
wright. When acted at the Odeon in 1889 it 
did not fail, but it did not prove a powerful at- 
traction. When published — and to the delight 
of all who are fond of the drama French plays 
are still published as English comedies were 
once — it impressed the expert as likely to read 
better than it acted. There was abundance of 
wit, for example, but it was rather the wit of 
M. Jules Lemaitre than of his characters, and 
it was rather the wit of the study than of the 
stage. Yet ' Revoltee ' is an honorable attempt, 
and highly interesting to all who are interested 
in M. Lemaitre. 

To sum up my opinion of these tentative en- 
deavors in other departments of literature, M. 
Lemaitre is a very clever man, whose cleverness 
does not lead him naturally and irresistibly to 
poetry or to story-telling or to playwriting. 



174 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

What it does lead him to is criticism — criticism 
of literature primarily, because he loves letters, 
but criticism also of life at large, of man and his 
manners, his motives, his relation to the world 
and to the universe. He has not only the fac- 
ulty of straight thinking, but also that of plain 
speaking. He is bold and direct in his discus- 
sion of social problems, applying to their solution 
an unusual common-sense, and developing also 
an unusual understanding of the causes of ap- 
parent anomalies. I do not know anywhere a 
more acute statement of the relative duty of 
faithfulness on the part of husband and wife 
than is to be found in his criticism of the ' Fran- 
cillon ' of M. Dumas fils. And that this state- 
ment should be found in a theatrical criticism is 
characteristic of M. Lemaitre's attitude ; as his 
vision broadens and his interest in life deepens, 
a play or a novel is to him chiefly valuable as 
the theme and text of a social inquiry. Liter- 
ature alone no longer satisfies. 

(1900). . , 



TWO SCOTSMEN OF LETTERS 



TWO SCOTSMEN OF LETTERS 

I.-MR. ANDREW LANG 

The most lifelike photograph of a friend is 
no more than a reminder of what we have 
seen for ourselves, since the camera has neither 
insight nor imagination ; a portrait by a true 
artist may bring out qualities but doubtfully 
glimpsed before, or it may even reveal depths 
of character hitherto unsuspected. In one of 
the London exhibitions during the season of 
1885, amidst many a " portrait of a gentleman," 
there was at least one portrait of a man — 
nervous, significant, vital. At a glance it was 
obvious that the man here depicted was a 
gentleman and a scholar, although the picture 
had none of the prim propriety of the ordinary 
academic portrait. There was an air of dis- 
tinction about the sitter, twisted around in 
his chair, with his frankly humorous gaze. The 
casual stranger whose eye might fall on the 
painting could not but feel that the restless 



178 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

attitude was inevitably characteristic, and he 
could not but confess the charm of a most 
interesting personality. And, indeed, Mr. 
Richmond's picture of Mr. Andrew Lang 
seems to me one of the most successful of 
modern portraits. 

Perhaps the first effect it makes on the be- 
holder is to suggest the extreme cleverness 
of its subject — an effect which may do an in- 
justice to Mr. Lang, for cleverness is best as 
an extra, as the superfluity of him who has 
some quality other and better. Moliere was 
not clever, and M. Sardou is clever beyond 
belief. When cleverness is all a man's having, 
though he make a brave show for a while, 
he is poor indeed. Cleverness Mr. Lang has, 
and a plethora of it; but he has also a richer 
endowment. He may be called the Admira- 
ble Crichton of modern letters ; and he is a 
graduate of St. Andrew's, that ancient Scottish 
university where the original Crichton was 
once a student three centuries earlier. Thence 
he went to Oxford, where there lingered 
memories of Landor and Shelley, where he 
took the Newdigate prize for poetry, and 
where in due season he was elected a Fellow 
of Merton, the college of Anthony Wood. 
Herein, I think, we may grasp the clew to Mr. 



MR. ANDREW LANG 179 

Lang's character, and to his career: he is a 
Scotsman who has been tinctured by Oxford, 
but who still grips his stony native land with 
many a clinging radicle. 

Mr. Andrew Lang and the late Robert Louis 
Stevenson were for a while the two Scottish 
chiefs of literature. Both lived out of Scotland, 
yet both were loyal to the land of their birth, 
and loved it with all the ardor of a good son's 
love. Neither was in robust health, but there 
was no taint of invalidism in the writings of 
either, no hint of morbid complaint or of un- 
wholesome self-compassion. Both were reso- 
lutely optimistic, as becomes Scotchmen. Both 
were critics, with sharp eyes for valuing, and 
with a faculty of enthusiastic and appetizing 
enjoyment of what is best. They had both 
attempted fiction, and both belong to the ro- 
mantic school. In differing degrees each was 
a poet, and each was master of a prose than 
which no better is written in our language 
nowadays. Mr. Lang's style has not the tor- 
tured felicity of Stevenson's ; its happiness 
is easier and less wilful. The author of ' Let- 
ters to Dead Authors ' is not an artificer of 
cunning phrase like the author of ' Memories 
and Portraits '; his style is not hand-made nor 
the result of taking thought ; it grows more 



l8o ASPECTS OF FICTION 

of its own accord. The style of each is trans- 
parent, but while Stevenson's is as hard as 
crystal, Mr. Lang's is fluid like water ; it flows, 
and sometimes it sings as it flows, like the 
beautiful brooks he longs to linger beside, 
changing with the sky and the rocks and the 
trees, but always limpid and delightful. 

American readers, annoyed at the sloven- 
liness of most modern British essayists, are 
struck by the transparent clearness of Mr. 
Lang's style ; for though he was born north 
of the Tweed his pages are spoiled by no Scot- 
ticisms, and though he dwells by the banks of 
the Thames they are disfigured by no Briti- 
cisms. They are free from the doubtful Eng- 
lish which has the " largest circulation in the 
world." A constant perusal of the fine prose 
of the great Frenchmen whom Mr. Lang ad- 
mires and a devoted study of the great Greeks 
whom he loves may have helped to give his 
pages their indisputable ease. 

In his pellucid prose, as in his intellectual 
alertness and in his lightness of touch, Mr. 
Lang is rather French than English. He is a 
nephew of Voltaire and a cousin of M. Jules 
Lemaitre. As we read his graceful and ner- 
vous sentences sometimes our ear catches an 
echo of Thackeray's cadences ; and it was in 



MR. ANDREW LANG* j$i 

France that Thackeray served his apprentice- 
ship to the trade of author. Sometimes our 
eye rejoices in the play of a humor always 
lambent and often Lamb-like ; and it is per- 
haps from Charles Lamb that Mr. Lang has 
got the knack of the quotation held in solu- 
tion. Like Dryden and Burke and Bagehot, 
three masters of English prose, Mr. Lang 
quotes abundantly and from a full memory, 
and not always exactly. " Verify your quo- 
tations " is not a warning that he has taken 
to heart. The books from which he can draw 
illustrations at will are numberless, and they 
are to be found in every department of the 
library. In Greek literature, and in French 
as well as in English, he has the minute thor- 
oughness of the scholar ; but his main read- 
ing seems to have been afield, as happens 
to every man who loves books, and who likes 
to browse among them without let or hinder- 
ance. 

The equipment of a critic Mr. Lang has, and 
the insight, and also the sympathy, without 
which the two other needful qualities lose half 
their value. There are limits to his sympathy, 
and he tells us that he does " not care for Mr. 
Gibbon except in his autobiography, nor for the 
elegant plays of M. Racine, nor very much for 



1 82 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Mr. William Wordsworth, though his genius is 
undeniable"; but the range of his knowledge 
and of his understanding seems to me as wide 
as that of any other contemporary British 
critic. He is unfailing in affection for Homer, 
Herodotus, Theocritus, and Lucian, for Vergil 
and Horace, for Rabelais, Moliere, and Dumas, 
for Shakespeare, Fielding, Miss Austen, and 
Thackeray, for Scott and Burns. He delights 
in the skittish writings of the lively lady who 
calls herself " Gyp," while for the psychologic 
subtleties of M. Paul Bourget he cares as lit- 
tle as does " Gyp " herself. He was prompt 
in praise of the author of ' King Solomon's 
Mines'; in fact, Mr. Haggard's tales of battle, 
murder, and sudden death have found no 
warmer eulogist than the author of ' Ballades 
in Blue China.' 

Longfellow declared that " many readers 
judge of the power of a book by the shock it 
gives their feelings, as some savage tribes de- 
termine the power of muskets by their recoil ; 
that being considered the best which fairly 
prostrates the purchaser." Mr. Lang's taste is 
too refined for this saying to be justly appli- 
cable to him ; but he does not think the worse 
of a book because it tells a tale of daring-do. 
He is eager for a story of 



MR. ANDREW LANG 183 

battles, sieges, fortunes 

Of moving accidents by flood and field, 
Of hair -breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly 
breach. 

He is quick to give a cordial greeting to a 
traveller's history of " antres vast and deserts 
idle," of " Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 
do grow beneath their shoulders." In other 
words, Mr. Lang is a romanticist to the bitter 
end. Broad as his sympathy is, it is not 
broad enough to comprehend realism. He is 
restive when realism is lauded. Unconscious- 
ly, no doubt, he resents it a little; and he does 
not quite understand it. Mr. Lang can enjoy 
Rabelais, and praise him for the qualities which 
make him great in spite of his wilful foulness ; 
but in M. Zola Mr. Lang sees little to com- 
mend. Quite the most perfunctory essay of 
Mr. Lang's that I ever read was one on the 
author of ' L'Assommoir,' which did but scant 
justice to the puissant laborer who toiled un- 
ceasingly on the massive edifice of the ' Rou- 
gon-Macquart ' series, as mightily planned and 
solid in structure as a medieval cathedral, and, 
like it, disfigured and defiled by needless and 
frequent indecencies. Tolerant towards most 
literary developments, Mr. Lang is a little in- 
tolerant towards the analysts. Amiel delights 



184 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

him not, nor Marie Bashkirtseff either ; and it 
irks him to hear Ibsen praised, or Tolstoi, 
though the pitiful figure of Anna Karenina 
lingers in his memory. And as for Mr. How- 
ells, it is hard to say whether it is as novelist 
or critic that he irritates Mr. Lang more. Mr. 
Howells once spoke of the critical essaylets 
which issued monthly from the ' Editor's 
Study ' as " arrows shot into the air in the 
hope that they will come down somewhere and 
hurt somebody." Enough of them have hit 
Mr. Lang to make him look like St. Sebastian, 
if only he had not plucked them out swiftly, 
one by one, and sent them hurtling back across 
the Atlantic. Fortunately, the injuries were 
not fatal on either side of the water, and there 
was no poison on the tips of the weapons to 
rankle in the wounds. Sensitive as most Brit- 
ish writers are to the darts of transatlantic 
criticism, it has seemed to me sometimes that 
Mr. Lang is even tenderer of skin than are 
most of his fellow-sufferers. 

The ocean that surges between Mr. Howells 
and Mr. Lang is unfordable, and there is no hope 
of a bridge. There is no common standing- 
ground anywhere for those who hold fiction to 
be primarily an amusement and those who be- 
lieve that it ought to be chiefly a criticism of 



MR. ANDREW LAXG 1 85 

life. The romanticist considers fiction as an art, 
and as an art only, whilst the extreme realist 
is inclined to look on it almost as a branch 
of science. Kindly as Mr. Lang may be in his 
reception of a realistic book, now and then, he 
stands firmly on the platform of the extreme 
romanticists. " Find forgetfulness of trouble, 
and taste the anodyne of dreams — that is what 
we desire " of a novel, he declares in his cordial 
essay on Dumas. And in another paper he 
calls again for a potion against insomnia : 

Pour out the nepenthe, in short, and I shall not 
ask if the cup be gold-chased by Mr. Stevenson, or a 
buffalo-born beaker brought by Mr. Haggard from 
Kakuana-land — the Baron of Bradwardine's Bear, or 
'The Cup of Hercules ' of Theophile Gautier, or mere- 
ly a common cafe wineglass of M. Fortune du Bois- 
gobey's or M. Xavier de Montepin's. If only the 
nepenthe be foaming there — the delightful draught of 
dear forgetfulness — the outside of the cup may take 
care of itself ; or, to drop metaphor, I shall not look 
too closely at an author's manner and style, while he 
entertains me in the dominion of dreams. 

Here Mr. Lang is in accord with Merimee, 
who wrote in 1865 that "there is at present 
but one man of genius : it is Ponson du Ter- 
rail . . . No one handles crime as he does, 

nor assassination. fen fais mes deliccs." But 



1 86 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

M6rimee's humorous exaggeration is not in 
accord with his own practice ; however abun- 
dant in imaginative vigor his stories might 
be, nothing could be more rigorously realistic 
in treatment. Mr. Lang seems to me happiest 
as a story-teller when his practice departs from 
his theory. His longest story, the ' Mark of 
Cain,' is as who should say a tale by M. Xavier 
de Montepin, but by a Montepin who was a 
Scotsman, and had been to Oxford, and did 
not take himself quite seriously. Now, for a 
romanticist not to take himself seriously is to 
give up the fight before the battle is joined. 
Mr. Lang has balladed the praises of " Miss 
Braddon and Gaboriau," and he may be sure 
that these masters of sensation believed in 
themselves, else would they never have held 
thousands breathless. If an author once lets 
his readers suspect that he is only "making 
believe," instantly he loses his grip on their 
attention, and may as well put away the pup- 
pets, since few spectators will care to wait till 
the fall of the curtain. 

The one fault that Mr. James found with 
Trollope — that "he took a suicidal satisfaction 
in reminding the reader that the story he was 
telling was only, after all, a make-believe" — 
Mr. Lang never commits of malice prepense; 



MR. ANDREW LANG 187 

but though he does not confess this unpar- 
donable sin in so many words, yet his tone, 
his manner, his confidential approach, make 
the confession for him, and readers find them- 
selves glancing up from the printed page to 
to see if the author has not his tongue in his 
cheek or is not laughing in his sleeve. And 
the crime is the more heinous in story-tell- 
ing according to the romantic tradition than 
in fiction of the realistic school. Mr. James 
reminds us that " there are two kinds of taste 
in the appreciation of imaginative literature 
— the taste for emotions of surprise, and 
the taste for emotions of recognition." It is 
the latter that ' Barchester Towers ' gratifies, 
and it is to the former that the ' Mark of 
Cain ' appeals ; and the taste for the emotions 
of surprise is not satisfied if it suspects the 
writer of treating tragic moments with levity, 
or even of being capable of such treatment. 
But perhaps the real reason why a public that 
accepted the tawdry ' Called Back' did not 
take kindly to the ' Mark of Cain ' is that the 
latter story was too clever by half — a thing 
resented by most of those who share Mr. 
Lang's taste for the emotions of surprise. 

Perhaps the same criticism applies to some 
of the stories in the collection called ' In 



1 88 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

the Wrong Paradise ' — to the Poe-like tale of 
'A Cheap Negro,' for example. But others 
of the stories in this volume, especially the 
uncanny tales of spooks and of medicine- 
men, are most delicious fooling — and fooling 
founded on the impregnable rock of modern 
science. What could be better in its way 
than the l Great Gladstone Myth ?' — wherein 
the grand old man is resolved into his ele- 
ments in the fashion familiar to students of 
sun -myths. Equally amusing, and quite as 
pregnant in suggestion, is the description of 
the poor souls who found themselves each 
' In the Wrong Paradise ' — the scalped Scotch- 
man dwelling with the Apaches in their happy 
hunting-grounds, and the wretched cockney 
esthete desperately out of place in the For- 
tunate Islands of the Greeks. And in the 
volume of pleasant papers on ' Books and 
Bookmen ' there is an eery tale of painful 
and humorous misadventure in ' A Bookman's 
Purgatory.' Akin to these in method, and 
even superior to them in charm, is the story 
of ' Prince Prigio,' which of all Mr. Lang's fic- 
tions I like best, unhesitatingly proclaiming 
it the most delightful of modern fairy-tales 
since the ' Rose and the Ring ' ; and if any 
one should tell me that he found no fun in 



MR. ANDREW LANG 1 89 

the awful combat between the Firedrake and 
the Remora, I should make answer that such 
an one, waking or sleeping, does not deserve 
ever to receive as a gift, or even as a loan, 
the seven-leagued boots, the cap of darkness, 
or the purse of Fortunatus — all properties of 
fairy -lore with which. Prince Prigio was duly 
accoutred. 

From fairy -land to the doubtful region of 
folk-lore is no seven -leagued stride, and Mr. 
Lang is master in both territories. He stands 
ready to trace the kinship of Barbarossa and 
Barbe-bleue, and to insist that neither is a 
child of the sun. In defence of his theories 
Mr. Lang is armed to give battle to Profess- 
or Max Miiller and his men ; and they find 
him a redoubtable opponent, in no danger of 
putting off the heavy armor of scholarship 
because he has not proved it, and never with- 
out a smooth stone in his scrip to cast full at 
the forehead of his adversary. Lowell has 
protested against that zeal which seeks to ex- 
plain away every myth as a personification of 
the dawn and the day. " There's not a sliver 
left of Odin," he declared : 



Or else the core his name enveloped 
Was from a solar myth developed 



190 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Which, hunted to its primal shoot, 
Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root, 
Thereby to instant death explaining 
The little poetry remaining. 
Try it with Zeus, 't is just the same ; 
The thing evades, we hug a name; 
Nay, scarcely that — perhaps a vapor 
Born of some atmospheric caper. 

Against the philologic school of mytholo- 
gists of whom Professor Max Miiller is the 
chief, Mr. Lang has led a revolt in behalf of an 
anthropological explanation of those habits, 
customs, beliefs, and legends for which the up- 
holders of the sun-myth theory provided an 
etymological interpretation. Mr. Lecky tells 
us that invariably with increased education the 
belief in fairies passes away, and " from the 
uniformity of this decline, we infer that fairy- 
tales are the normal product of a certain con- 
dition of the imagination ; and this position is 
raised to a moral certainty when we find that 
the decline of fairy-tales is but one of a long 
series of similar transformations." Inspired 
by McLennan and Professor Tylor, and fol- 
lowing Fontenelle, Mr. Lang has given battle 
to those who maintain that the descriptions of 
the elemental processes of nature developed 
into myths, and who accept a personification 



MR. ANDREW LANG iqi 

of fire, storm, cloud, or lightning as the origin 
of Apollo and his chariot, Thor and his ham- 
mer, Cinderella and her slipper, and B'rer Rab- 
bit and the tar-baby. 

In the stead of the arbitrary interpretations 
of the philologists, wherein scarcely any two 
of them are agreed, Mr. Lang proffers an ex- 
planation derived from a study of the history 
of man and founded on the methods of com- 
parative anthropology. He turns to account 
the evolution of humanity from savagery to 
civilization, and he examines the irrational 
beliefs and absurd customs which survived in 
Greece even in the days of Pericles by the aid 
of a study of the beliefs and customs of sav- 
age tribes still in the condition in which the 
ancient Greeks had once been. Thus he is 
ready to see in the snake-dance of the Moquis 
of Arizona a possible help to the right un- 
derstanding of a similar ceremony described 
by Demosthenes. He seeks to show that in 
savagery we have " an historical condition of 
the human intellect to which the element in 
myths, regarded by us as irrational," seems 
rational enough. Further, he urges that as 
savagery is a stage through which all civilized 
races have passed, the universality of the 
mythopceic mental condition will explain not 



*9 2 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

only the origin, but also the diffusion through- 
out the world, of myths strangely alike one to 
another. 

That this ethnological hypothesis has gained 
general acceptance, and placed the philologic 
theory on the defensive, is due almost alto- 
gether to the untiring advocacy of Mr. Lang. 
His views have been presented modestly but 
firmly and incessantly. He has prepared the 
case himself, examined the witnesses, and 
summed up for the plaintiff. And he is an 
awkward antagonist, quick-witted and keen- 
sighted, and heavy-laden with the results of 
original anthropological investigation. He has 
scholarship in the old sense of the word ; and 
to this he adds the advantage of a memory 
which retains every pertinent fact accumu- 
lated during omnivorous reading over a mar- 
vellously wide range of subjects. Most dis- 
interested scholars have now accepted either 
as a whole or in part the theory Mr. Lang has 
set forth. 

Of the scholarship which forms the solid 
basis for Mr. Lang's scientific inquiry he has 
given abundant evidence in his nervous prose 
translations of the 'Odyssey' and the i Iliad' 
done in partnership with friends, in his refined 
rendering of the * Idyls ' of Theocritus, and 



MR. ANDREW LANG 1 93 

in his fresh and fragrant version of that other 
idyl, i Aucassin and Nicolette.' His transla- 
tions reveal an unusual union of scholarly ex- 
actness with idiomatic vigor ; they are grace- 
ful — almost the rarest quality of a translation 
— and they are unfailingly poetic. Perhaps 
an enforced quaintness, and an occasional 
insistence on an archaic word, seem almost 
like affectation, but this may be forgiven in 
the charm and the felicity of the rendering as 
a whole. The secret of this charm is to be 
found, I think, in Mr. Lang's attitude towards 
the authors he translates. To him Homer, 
and Theocritus, and the old man who sang 
of 'Aucassin and Nicolette,' are still living, 
and their works are alive. Scholar as he is, 
his interest is never grammatical or philo- 
logical, but always literary and human. He 
never regards these writings as verse to scan, 
or as prose to parse, but poetry to be enjoyed. 
As it happens, Mr. Lang has attempted no 
long translations in verse, but some of his 
briefer metrical attempts are almost as happy 
as Longfellow's, than which there can hard- 
ly be higher praise. No doubt the carrying 
over of a lyric from one language to another 
is an easier task than the transferring of an 
epic, but nevertheless it is a feat many a 



194 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

minor poet has failed to accomplish. The 
difficulty lies in the double duty of the trans- 
lator to present the thought of his original 
and to preserve the form, not sacrificing the 
spirit, and at least suggesting the atmosphere. 
Mr. Lang has given us the most satisfactory 
version of Villon's ' Ballade of Dead Ladies ' 
(although Rossetti attempted it earlier), and 
of Clement Marot's ' Brother Lubin ' (although 
both Longfellow and Bryant severally essayed 
it, neglecting to retain the ballade form). 

In his brightsome ' Ballades in Blue China,' 
and in his brilliant ' Rhymes a la Mode,' 
Mr. Lang shows his mastery of the accom- 
plishment of verse, and his skill in that de- 
partment of poetry which seems easy and is 
beset with danger. Voltaire tells us that 
difficulty conquered in whatsoever form of art 
is a large share of the merit ; and neither in 
sonnet, nor ballade, nor other fixed form of 
verse, has Mr. Lang shirked any difficulty. If 
the game is worth the candle, Mrs. Battle is 
right in insisting on the rigor of the game. 
In his freer stanzas Mr. Lang has sometimes 
something of the singing simplicity of Long- 
fellow and Heine, where the music of the 
verse sustains the emotion. In 'Twilight on 
Tweed '— 



MR. ANDREW LANG 1 95 

A mist of memory broods and floats, 

The Border waters flow: 
The air is full of ballad notes, 

Borne out of long ago, 

and in the ' Last Cast/ the angler's thoughts 
wander to the rivers he has never fished, and 
then go back to the streams of Scotland 
again : 

Unseen, Eurotas, southward steal, 
Unknown, Alpheus, westward glide, 

You never heard the ringing reel, 
The music of the water-side ! 

Though gods have walked your woods among, 
Though nymphs have fled your banks along, 

You speak not that familiar tongue 
Tweed murmurs like my cradle-song. 

My cradle-song — nor other hymn 

I'd choose, nor gentler requiem dear 

Than Tweed's, that through death's twilight dim 
Mourned in the last Minstrel's ear. 

Mr. Lang has taken for an epigraph Mo- 
liere's Ce ne sont point de grands vers pom- 
peux, mais de petit vers, yet he has at times 
the gift of lofty lines. It is only fair to judge 
a poet by his highest effort. In the case of 
the present poet these seem to me to be two 



196 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

sonnets on Homer, of a sustained and noble 
elevation. For love of Homer's heroine Mr. 
Lang has written his longest poem, ' Helen 
of Troy,' a brevet-epic. 

The face that launch'd a thousand ships 
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium 

holds its fascination still across the centuries. 
Nor is " Sweet Helen," as Faustus calls her, 
the only lady of Mr. Lang's affections. He 
has a wealth of platonic love for many a fair 
dame (in poetry), and for many a damsel in 
distress (in prose). I doubt if he would deny 
his devotion to Beatrix Esmond, for whose 
sake the author of the ' Faithful Fool ' (a 
comedy once performed by Her Majesty's 
Servants) broke his sword before his king. I 
question whether he would not admit an affec- 
tion for Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, nte Sharp, a 
green-eyed lady who once acted Clytemnestra 
at the Gaunt House theatricals. I know that 
he confessed a fondness for Manon Lescaut, 
a young person of reprehensible morals, who 
lightly sinned in France and then died happily 
in Louisiana. And I think that he is ready 
to boast of his liking for Miss Annie P. Miller 
of Schenectady, New York, an American girl 
who was known to her intimates as " Daisy," 



MR. ANDREW LANG 1 97 

and who died in Rome after an imprudent 
visit to the Colosseum by moonlight. 

Mr. Lang has the same frank and sturdy 
love for literature that he has for some of its 
captivating female figures. No reader of his 
could be in doubt as to his ceaseless and loyal 
study of Homer and Theocritus, of Rabelais 
and Moliere, of Shakespeare and Thackeray. 
And in sports, too, his tastes are as wholesome 
and as abundant as his predilections in let- 
ters. He cherishes the cricket of Oxford and 
the golf of St. Andrews ; he follows with equal 
zest trout- fishing and book- hunting. Than 
this last there is indeed no better sport ; and 
the poetic author of ' Books and Bookmen ' 
has proved his interest in the bees of De 
Thou as well as in those that made the hon- 
ey of Hymettus. The original Crichton, we 
may remember, sent an epistle in verse to 
Aldus Manutius, the great printer -publisher 
of Venice. 

Mr. Lang is at his best when he writes 
about the Scots and about the Greeks of old, 
for these he knows and loves ; and perhaps he 
appears to least advantage when he is writing 
about the American writers of to-day, since 
these he neither likes nor cares to know — 
and unsympathetic criticism is foredoomed to 



198 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

sterility. The native Americans Mr. Lang is 
most familiar with are the red men, and he is 
fonder of them, I fancy, than he is of the pale 
faces who have built towns by the banks of 
the streams over which Uncas and Hard-Heart 
skilfully propelled their birch - bark canoes. 
It might have been better, therefore, had he 
not laid himself open to Mr. Fiske's rebuke 
for the " impatient contempt " with which he 
chose to speak of a man of Lewis H. Morgan's 
calibre; and if he had not permitted himself 
a doubtfully courteous attack on Professor Boy- 
esen. And a more careful understanding of 
American literary history would have saved 
Mr. Lang from that farewell to Poe, in the 
' Letters to Dead Authors,' in which the 
author of the ' Raven ' is hailed as " a gentle- 
man among canaille ! " — surely as strange an 
opinion as one can find in all the long annals 
of criticism. 

' Letters to Dead Authors ' is one of the 
minor masterpieces of letters, the keenest and 
cleverest volume of playful criticism since the 
1 Fable for Critics ' was published twoscore 
years ago, as that in its turn was the brightest 
book of the kind since ' Rejected Addresses.' 
But I am afraid to linger over this delight- 
ful tome for fear I may laud it extravagantly. 



MR. ANDREW LANG 1 99 

The ' Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope,' a mar- 
vel of parody with many lines as good as the 
one which tells the poet that 

Dunces edit him whom dunces feared ! 

the letter to " Monsieur de Moliere, Valet-de- 
Chambre du Roi," with its delicious sugges- 
tion that if the great and sad French humorist 
were alive to-day he might write a new com- 
edy on les Molieristes ; the communication to 
Herodotus, with its learned fooling; the mis- 
sive to Alexandre Dumas, with its full current 
of hearty admiration and enjoyment — these 
and many another I dare not dwell on, because, 
as I read in the letter to W. M. Thackeray, 
" there are many things that stand in the way 
of the critic when he has a mind to praise the 
living." Quite as welcome as these are some 
of the essays in epistolary parody to be found 
in < Old Friend.' 

Of necessity every man has the defects of 
his qualities, and the very success of Mr. 
Lang's briefer essays tends to prevent his 
attempting longer labors. He gets most out 
of a subject which may be treated on the 
instalment plan, when every portion is com- 
plete in itself, and yet unites with the oth- 
ers to form a complete whole. A book like 



200 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

1 Letters to Dead Authors,' which is avowedly 
a collection of separable essays, has not only 
a broader outlook but also a stronger unity 
than the pleasantly discursive volume on Ox- 
ford, for example. A collection of Tanagra 
figurines, however, is in no wise inferior in 
interest to a colossal statue ; art has nothing 
to do with mere bulk, nor has literature. Mr. 
Lang cultivates to best advantage ground 
which can most easily be cut into allotments. 

It is to be noted also that despite his ex- 
treme multifariousness there are certain seg- 
ments of life and of literature in which Mr. 
Lang takes little interest or none. Though 
he once wrote a poem on General Gordon, 
and though he is ever charring Mr. Gladstone, 
it is obvious that he cares not for the con- 
tentions of politics ; and apparently he cares 
as little for the disputes of theology, although 
he did write a chance article on ' Robert 
Elsmere.' For art, music, and the drama he 
reveals no natural inclination. We may guess 
that it has been his fate to serve as art-critic, 
toiling in the galleries yearly ; but we can 
discover no signs of any real understanding 
of art, either pictorial or plastic, nor of any 
aptitude for it. Of music he says almost 
nothing, and he seems to know as little about 



MR. ANDREW LANG 201 

it as we know about the song the Syrens sang. 
And as for the acted drama, I am afraid 
that he is a heretic, even as Lamb was heret- 
ical in regard to the performance of Shake- 
speare's plays. I hesitate to assert, though 
I am inclined to believe, that to him ' As You 
Like It ' and ' Much Ado About Nothing ' 
are comedies to be read in the fields or by 
the fireside, rather than stage -plays to be 
acted before the footlights. 

(1893-) 



II.— MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

The news of the death of Robert Louis 
Stevenson in that far-off Pacific isle, removed 
by half a continent from his native Scotland, 
gives a sudden shock to all who care for our 
later literature ; and it has left us, I think, 
with a sense of personal loss, as though he had 
died with whom we had held delightful inter- 
course in the past, and with whom we could 
hope to have many another stimulating talk 
in the future. This feeling is doubled and far 
deeper in those of us who had the privilege of 
knowing Stevenson, even if our acquaintance 
with him were as slight as mine — and I can 
treasure the precious memory of but a single 
long afternoon on the same sofa with him, in 
the dingy back smoking-room of the Savile 
Club, one dismal day of a London summer 
nearly ten years ago. Chiefly we talked of 
our craft, of the art of story - telling, of the 
technic of play-making. I remember distinct- 
ly his hearty praise of Mark Twain's ' Huckle- 



MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 203 

berry Finn/ and his cordial belief that it was 
a great book, riper in art and ethically richer 
than the 'Tom Sawyer' of which it is the 
sequel. I recall the courtesy and the frank- 
ness with which he gave me his opinion of a 
tale of mine he happened to have read recent- 
ly. Frankness, indeed, was a constant quality 
of his conversation ; and perhaps his spoken 
word was fresher and freer than his written 
lines — it could not but be less premeditated. 
With a very strong individuality, there was no 
pose in his manner, no affectation, no airs and 
graces. He looked unlike other men, with his 
tall thin figure, his long thin face, his nervous 
thin hands. As one's eyes first fell on him 
one felt that he was somebody, and not any- 
body at random. If one had dropped into 
talk with him by chance in a train or in a 
doctor's waiting-room, one could not have 
resisted the impress of his personality. He 
talked well, although not perhaps with the 
spontaneous many - sidedness of his friend 
Fleeming Jenkin (whom he introduced as 
Cockshot in his own essay on ' Talk and 
Talkers '). He talked well, standing up square- 
ly against the other party to the conversation, 
holding his own stoutly, expressing his views 
in straightforward fashion, with no beating 



204 



ASPECTS OF FICTION 



about the bush, no questing of epigram, no 
strain of phrase-making. He talked well, as 
he wrote well, because he had something to 
say, and because he had taught himself how 
best to say it. 

In the writing of the author, as in the talk 
of the man himself, perhaps the two salient 
qualities were vigor and variety. The vigor 
every one has felt who chances to have read a 
single book of Stevenson's — and who of us, 
having read any one of them, has not sat him- 
self down to read them all? The variety is 
equally evident if we look down the long list 
of his works — and the list is really very long 
indeed, when we remember that the books on 
it were written, all of them, by a dying man, 
who finally departed this life before he was 
fifty. He was a poet of distinction, although 
not of high achievement. Although no single 
one of his poems has been taken home to the 
hearts of the people of his speech, yet ' A 
Child's Garden of Verses ' is as unlike any 
rymes of earlier poets as any volume of verse 
of this last quarter of the nineteenth century. 
He was a writer of travel-sketches, and here 
again he revealed the same originality ; and 
he was able to describe ' Edinburgh,' his boy- 
hood's home, with the same freedom from 



MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 205 

staleness, the same eschewal of the common- 
place, that gave freshness to ' Silverado Squat- 
ters ;' while in ' Travels with a Donkey ' and 
1 An Inland Voyage ' he achieved a detach- 
ment of the man from his circumstances 
unattempted by anybody before, excepting 
only the author of ' Walden.' He was a biog- 
rapher and a literary critic, and although his 
life of ' Fleeming Jenkin ' is the least suc- 
cessful of his works, being marred by a hint 
of a patronizing manner entirely unbecoming 
towards a man of the character and accomplish- 
ment of " The Flamer," still the task was done 
in workmanlike fashion ; and Stevenson's other 
sketches of authors in his ' Familiar Studies 
of Men and Books,' and elsewhere, are free 
from this defect. It is to be noted here that 
he was one of the rare British critics capable 
of appreciating Walt Whitman with sanity, 
while another American, Thoreau, was per- 
haps almost the strongest of all the influences 
which moulded him — quite the strongest after 
Scott, I think. He was an essayist, and 
among the most piquant and individual of his 
time, an essayist of the race and lineage of 
Montaigne, of Lamb, and of Lowell, interested 
in life as much as in literature, seeing for him- 
self, always inquiring and always acquisitive, 



2o6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

having philosophical standards of his own, and 
using them to measure men and manners, and 
yet never intolerant, though ever sincere. He 
was a dramatist at least one of whose plays, 
'Deacon Brodie/was fairly successful in with- 
standing the touchstone test of the actual 
theatre; yet it must be admitted that his 
dramas, written, all of them, in conjunction 
with Mr. W. E. Henley, have rather the 
robustious manner of that burly writer than 
the commingled delicacy and force of Steven- 
son's other work. And, lastly, he was also a 
story-teller. 

It is as a story-teller that he won his widest 
triumphs; it is as a story-teller that he is 
most likely to linger on the shelves of our 
grandchildren's libraries ; it was as a story- 
teller that he revealed his greatest variety. 
First and last he tried his hand at four kinds 
of fiction. In the ' New Arabian Nights,' 
with its sequel, the 'Dynamiter,' he revived 
the tale of fantasy with an inventive ingenuity 
unequalled certainly since Poe published the 
1 Tales of the Grotesque and, the Arabesque.' 
In the ' Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
Hyde,' and in ' Markheim,' he gave us the 
strongest stories of introspection and imagi- 
nation since Hawthorne's ' Scarlet Letter ' and 



MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 207 

1 Marble Faun.' In ' Kidnapped ' and in 
' David Balfour ' and in the ' Master of Bal- 
lantrae ' he presented us with the most vivid 
and actual of Scotch romances since Scott 
came home from vacant exile to die at Abbots- 
ford. And in the 'Wrecker' and certain of 
its fellows he tried, not without a large measure 
of success, to varnish with sheer art the vulgar 
detective-story, and to give a tincture of litera- 
ture to the tale of crime committed and the 
secret ferreted out at last. And even now, 
though it has been easy to show that as a 
teller of tales Stevenson's versatility has thus 
four phases, ' Treasure Island ' has to be left 
out of the account, simply because it refuses 
to classify itself with the others — perhaps be- 
cause it prefers to take its chances with ' Rob- 
inson Crusoe.' 

Stevenson had his theory of fiction, and his 
practice was like his preaching — which is an- 
other proof of his originality. In the evolu- 
tion of the modern novel from the primitive 
romance, in the progress first from the Impos- 
sible to the Improbable, and then from the 
Probable to the Inevitable, he refused to go to 
the end. 

He preferred the Improbable to the Inevi- 
table. He was a romanticist to the backbone, 



208 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

a reactionary, so those of us think who most 
relish in literature the essence of actual life. 
But though he fought for his own hand, and 
defended his own doctrine stanchly, with char- 
acteristic good faith he tried to understand 
the point of view of those with whom he con- 
tended. Himself liking the dramatic novel, 
as he called it, the bold romance wherein is 
set forth the strife of passionate character 
against passionate character, he did not ap- 
prove of Mr. Henry James's habit of keeping 
the scene-a-faire behind closed doors. Yet in 
his reply to Mr. James's paper on the ' Art of 
Fiction,' a reply which he modestly entitled 
' A Humble Remonstrance,' he combated the 
views of the author of ' Daisy Miller ' with the 
utmost courtesy ; and in a postscript to the 
same paper he recorded his dissent from what 
he called the "narrow convictions" of Mr. 
Howells ; but he seized the occasion to declare 
the author of ' Silas Lapham ' to be " a poet, a 
finished artist, a man in love with the ap- 
pearance of life, a cunning reader of the 
mind." 

Being a Scotsman, Stevenson was nearer to 
the American than the Englishman can be, 
and he had a quicker willingness to under- 
stand the American character. As a Scots- 



MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 209 

man, also, he had keener artistic perceptions 
than an Englishman is likely to have. He 
was not only a born story-teller, as Scott was, 
but he was also a master of the craft, a loving, 
devoted, untiring student of the art, which 
Scott was not. He never attained to the 
mastery of form which Guy de Maupassant 
derived as a tradition from the French classics ; 
his stories are often straggling. And he had 
not the relish for fresh technicalities which is 
one of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's peculiarities. I 
remember Fleeming Jenkin telling me how 
his sons, who had sailed a boat from their 
earliest youth, were sorely puzzled by the im- 
possible manoeuvres of the ship in ' Treasure 
Island,' and how they came to their father 
despairingly to declare that " this never hap- 
pened, did it? It couldn't, could it?" 

Not only these deficiencies have been dwelt 
on, but the absence has been pointed out of 
what is known as the " female interest " in 
his stories ; and it is a fact that almost the 
only satisfactory and enticing petticoats of Mr. 
Stevenson's draping are in ' David Balfour.' 
But these defects are as naught against the 
narrative skill of Stevenson, his unfailing fer- 
tility of invention, his firm grasp of character, 
his insight into the springs of human nature, 



2IO ASPECTS OF FICTION 

and, above all, his contagious interest in the 
tale he is telling. 

Whether it is a tale he is telling, or a drama 
with its swift sharp dialogue, or an essay ram- 
bling and ambling skilfully to its unseen end, 
the style is always the style of a man who has 
learnt how to make words bend to his bidding. 
He writes as one to whom the parts of speech 
must needs obey. He had a picked vocabu- 
lary at his command, and he was ever on the 
watch for the unexpected phrase. He strove 
incessantly to escape from the hackneyed form 
of words, and cut-and-dried commonplaces of 
speech — and no doubt the effort is evident 
sometimes, although the instances are rare 
enough. There is at times, it is true, more 
than a hint of preciousness, but he never fell 
into the self-consciousness which marred many 
of the late Mr. Walter Pater's periods. ' Prince 
Otto,' written obviously under the influence 
of Mr. George Meredith, had more of these 
aniline patches, as it was also the feeblest of 
his fictions. The open letter on Father Da- 
mien, for example, had . a sturdy directness 
of statement which suggested Walt Whitman 
again. 

The impression of mere dilettante idling 
which one may get at first from some of the 



MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 211 

earlier essays is evanescent. As Mr. James 
put it, much as Stevenson " cares for his phrase, 
he cares more for life, and for a certain tran- 
scendently lovable part of it." And herein Mr. 
James saw " the respectable, desirable moral." 
To me, at least, there was no need to seek a 
moral between the lines, for was not Steven- 
son a true Scotchman, and could he ever for- 
get the chief end of man ? Only a Scotsman 
could have written the ' Strange Case of Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' as only a New-Eng- 
lander could have written the ' Scarlet Letter.' 
There is an inheritance from the Covenanters 
and a memory of the Shorter Catechism in 
Stevenson's bending and twisting the dark 
problems of our common humanity to serve 
as the core of his tales. 

It is curious that a writer so independent as 
Stevenson and so various should have been 
tempted so often into collaboration ; but it is 
a fact that no man of letters of our time and 
our language has taken more literary partners. 
With Mr. W. E. Henley he composed at least 
four plays, and they are to be set down rather 
to Mr. Henley's credit, as I have suggested, 
than to Stevenson's. With Mrs. Stevenson he 
wrote the ' Dynamiter ;' and with her son, Mr. 
Lloyd Osbourne, he told three tales, the ' Wrong 



212 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Box/ the ' Wrecker,' and the ' Ebb-Tide,' in 
which we find a more open humor than in his 
other stories. But, as those only know who 
have themselves collaborated in good faith, it 
is always impossible to disentangle the contri- 
bution of one partner from that of the other, 
if, indeed, there has been not a mere mechan- 
ical mixture, but a true chemical union. What- 
ever associates Stevenson had now and again, 
he was the senior partner always, and it was 
his trade-mark that warranted the goods of 
the firm. 

(1894.) 



ASPECTS OF FICTION 



ASPECTS OF FICTION 

I.-THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 

Whenever the annalist of English litera- 
ture shall record the history of the year 1894, 
one of the most curious items he will have to 
set down in his account cannot but be the 
sudden success achieved in fiction by a mature 
practitioner of another art. To take all hearts 
by storm, Trilby had only to appear, and no 
sooner did she show herself than hundreds of 
thousands of readers lay prostrate at her in- 
comparable feet. Irresistible as was Mr. Du 
Maurier's charming heroine, and however ac- 
ceptable the tale of Trilby's misadventures 
may be as a reproduction of actual life, it is 
not a masterpiece of narrative art. Delightful 
as it is, full as it is of the freshness of youth 
and of the joy of living, it could easily be torn 
to pieces, as a story merely, were any critic 
hard-hearted enough for the hateful task. No 
one knows better than Mr. Du Maurier that 



2l6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

his unpretentious romance is not savamment 
file, as he might say himself. He has not 
studied fiction as an art diligently from his 
youth up ; and it was late in life, and almost 
by accident, that he discovered his ownership 
of the gift of story-telling. 

The gift of story-telling ! This it is which 
Mr. Du Maurier has, and which he obviously 
did not know he had, or he would have re- 
vealed it earlier in his career. It is this gift 
of story-telling which Mr. Du Maurier has un- 
expectedly found himself to possess in a high 
degree that enables him so to enchant us with 
his tale that we overlook all the evidences of 
his inexpertness as a maker of romances. It 
is this native faculty of narrative which the 
writer of fiction must needs have as a condi- 
tion precedent to the practice of his craft, and 
without some small portion of which the con- 
scious art of the most highly trained novelist 
is of no avail. 

This gift of story-telling can exist indepen- 
dently of any other faculty. It may be all 
that its possessor has. He might be wholly 
without any of the qualifications of the Itera- 
tor; he might lack education and intelligence; 
he might have no knowledge of the world, no 
experience of life, and no insight into charac- 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 21 7 

ter ; he might be devoid of style, and even of 
grammar ; — all these deficiencies are as nothing 
if only he have the gift of story-telling. With- 
out that, he may have all the other qualifica- 
tions and still fail as a writer of fiction. With 
that, even though without them, he may make 
sure of an audience whenever and wherever he 
shall choose to take up his tale. 

In so far as the gift of story-telling exists in- 
dependently, it is like the ability to make an 
effective speech, the knack of writing an acta- 
ble play, the power of acquiring money ; and 
its possession is no proof whatever that the 
possessor is abler than his fellows except in 
that one direction. That a man succeeds in 
anything is evidence that he had not mischos- 
en his calling; that whatever his general in- 
telligence may be, and however slight it may 
be, he has at least a full share of the special 
intelligence needed in the art in question (be 
that only the humble art of making money). 
Here we have an explanation of the surprise 
which has shocked us often on meeting the 
maker of an immense fortune when he revealed 
himself as a man of no great intelligence. It 
accounts for the sharp disappointment we have 
felt on finding that the musician, the painter, 
the tragedian of high rank in his profession 



2l8 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

may be a man of no more than ordinary intel- 
lectual force. 

A chance remark of a distinguished French 
comedian first suggested to me this simple ex- 
planation. I had met a member of the com- 
pany, and I had found him almost stupid, 
although as a performer he was more than 
acceptable; and I asked my friend how this 
could be, that so dull a man could be so good 
an actor. He shrugged his shoulders and 
smiled, and answered : " Why not ? It is just 
the same in the other arts." I was forced to 
admit that I had known musicians also who 
had nothing to recommend them but their 
music. " Painters too," he returned. " Look 

at M , the greatest painter we have, and 

he's an old chump !" for so I venture freely 
to render the untranslatable French phrase 
vieille ganache. " It is the same in all the 
arts : to succeed in any of them one needs the 
intelligence of that art — one doesn't need any 
other intelligence." 

A further consideration has led me to make 
a threefold classification of successful actors — 
first, those who have the histrionic faculty and 
nothing else; second, those who are intelligent, 
and who make their intelligence a substitute 
for the natural gift ; and third, those few who, 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 219 

besides being born actors, are also men of in- 
tellect and character. Charles Lamb's friend 
Munden may be taken as the type of the actor 
who is an actor only. Munden must have been 
a great comedian ; but it is only as a comedian 
that he was great ; in the ordinary relations of 
life he was a very ordinary man. Macready, 
on the other hand, is an instance of the suc- 
cess with which a deficiency of the native his- 
trionic faculty can be supplemented by force 
of character and by general intelligence. Ma- 
cready was not a born actor ; he was a made 
actor. Lewes — than whom there is no shrewder 
English dramatic critic — declares his belief that 
Macready would have made his way to the 
front either at the bar or in the Church quite 
as well as he did on the stage. But who could 
imagine Munden in any other calling than the 
comedian's? 

A large majority of the actors of any time 
belong to the first of these classes ; they act 
because " it is their nature to "; their readings 
and their gestures are right more often than 
not from unconscious intuition, not from any 
reason they could give. Smaller and yet al- 
ways well represented is the second division, 
men and women of little natural endowment 
for the theatre, making up for this deficiency 



2 20 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

by exceeding carefulness, by conscientious 
study, by sheer force of determination. These 
are the performers who are coldly praised as 
" scholarly." In London I once asked a friend 
who really understands the theatre what sort 
of an actor so-and-so was. " So-and-so ?" he 
answered ; " he is a most scholarly actor, un- 
derstanding his art thoroughly; but sooner 
than see him act, I'd rather be all alone by 
myself in a dark room !" 

The third class, consisting of those who have 
intellect and character and culture as well as a 
natural gift for their vocation, is as rare on the 
stage as it is in the studio or in the library ; it 
must always be very rare everywhere. The 
typical actor having this double endowment 
was David Garrick, who was at once the first 
tragedian of his time and the first comedian, 
who was the foremost manager and one of the 
leading dramatists, who wrote delightful light 
verse, and who held his own as a talker with 
the best men of The Club, and who was alto- 
gether the marvel of the stage. In our own 
days it is not difficult to designate actors who 
have not only the histrionic faculty in a very 
high degree, but who have also, like Garrick, a 
full share of culture and character and intel- 
lect. Mr. Joseph Jefferson here in America, 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 221 

M. Coquelin in Paris, Herr Barnay in Berlin — 
these are among the first names that now come 
to mind. 

A triple classification like this here attempted 
for actors can be made for all other artists — for 
painters, for sculptors, and for architects, for 
orators, for poets, and for dramatists. All fall 
into the three divisions — those with the special 
temperament, those with general ability, and 
the scanty few who have both the general abil- 
ity and the special temperament. Turner, for 
example, was born to be a painter, and he knew 
nothing but how to paint ; Washington All- 
ston made himself a painter by indomitable per- 
severance ; while Michael Angelo had ability 
of many kinds, and in a high degree. To turn 
from one art to another, Sheil was a born 
speech-maker, and Whitfield had the same gift 
of eloquence, but neither of them had anything 
to say which has survived ; while Burke was 
the profoundest political thinker of his cen- 
tury, yet he had so little of the natural gift of 
the orator that his delivery of the speeches we 
still study emptied the House of Commons. 
Strangely infrequent is the power of impress- 
ing an immediate audience with words that 
will also abide after the interest of the occa- 
sion has departed. Daniel Webster achieved 



22 2 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

this triumph more than once, though he never 
equalled the pregnant simplicity of Lincoln's 
Gettysburg speech, which carried away the 
listening thousands on the battle-field then, 
and now is cherished in the hundreds of thou- 
sands of memories. 

Among the dramatists the second of these 
three classes is very small indeed. In the 
making of a play to please the broad public 
(to which the dramatist must always appeal), 
temperament counts for far more than culture. 
Without the inborn dramaturgic faculty the 
ablest man of letters finds himself absolutely 
at a loss. This dramaturgic faculty is wholly 
distinct from literary ability ; and it sometimes 
is to be found in the possession of men having 
little or no tincture of literature. And this is 
why critics, trained to appreciate purely literary 
qualities, so often fail wholly to understand the 
success of a popular play, the literary defects 
of which are too obvious ; this is why they are 
so often forced to wonder at the failure of the 
brilliantly written comedy of a man of letters 
who happens to be without the dramatic tem- 
perament. It is the born playwright who has 
interested the broad public at all times; he has 
interested it none the less when he chanced 
also to have literature. As a substitute for 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 223 

the specific gift literary art was inadmissible, 
but as a supplement it was welcome. It is 
style alone that survives; and so most of the 
plays of the past which had the widest popu- 
larity have sunk out of sight, and their makers' 
names are forgotten. 

Lamb calls Heywood a "prose Shake- 
speare ;" and of all the early Elizabethan 
dramatists none was more acceptable to the 
play-goers of the period than Heywood ; he 
had the dramaturgic faculty, he was a born 
playwright, but it was only now and again 
that he rose to the level of literature. Ben 
Jonson sought to make up for his lack of the 
natural gift by scholarship and energy and 
toil ; and in most cases he had his labor for 
his pains, and he took his pay in contempt for 
those who refused to be amused by his hard 
work. Shakespeare had the native endow- 
ment, and he was the best " Shakescene of 
them all " — the most popular playwright of 
his time. That he was the hack-dramatist of 
his theatre, patching up old plays to tempt 
the groundlings, and knowing every trick of 
the trade and up to every device of the craft, 
did not prevent him from being also the great- 
est of English poets. But it is not the abiding 
beauty of his verse, it is not his profound 



224 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

insight into human recognized character, it is 
his native gift of play-making by contemporary 
play-goers which keeps a third of his come- 
dies and tragedies on the boards now nearly 
three hundred years after his death. 

Just as one man succeeds in the theatre 
because he is a born playwright, despite his 
deficiency in all other qualities, so another 
man wins his way as a poet because he is a 
born lyrist. If he have but the gift of song, 
we have no right to expect from him any- 
thing else. From a songster it is absurd to 
demand thought ; if he but give us melody, 
that is enough. A poet may be a literary vir- 
tuoso of incomparable technic, like Theophile 
Gautier, for example — a surpassingly skilful 
artist in words, and quite incapable of any- 
thing fairly to be called an original thought. 
His verse may be a marvellous instrument for 
the reproduction of tones and tints and deli- 
cate shades of sensation and emotion, and he 
himself may have a small mind and a little 
soul. There are those who have proclaimed 
Wordsworth to be a thinker as well as a poet, 
but they would be daring indeed who should 
set up such a claim for Tennyson, than whom 
the literary history of England records no 
more accomplished master of the art of verse. 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 225 

Yet the late poet-laureate eagerly assimilated 
much of the best thought of his time, and 
thus nourished his stanzas and gave them 
substance and solidity. But the French poet 
who was Tennyson's contemporary and rival 
was less receptive; it might almost be said 
that Victor Hugo was as impervious to 
thought as he was to humor. He was a singer 
of lyrics, a painter of pictures in rhyme ; just 
a poet and nothing else. As one of the acutest 
of recent French critics, M. Jules Lemaitre, 
has put it, compactly, "A man for whom 
Robespierre, Saint-Just, and even Hebert and 
Marat, are giants, for whom Bossuet and De 
Maistre are odious monsters, and for whom 
Nisard and M6rim£e are imbeciles, this man 
may have genius, but, beyond all question, 
genius is all he has." And yet no one has 
been ampler than M. Lemaitre in praise of 
Hugo as a poet pure and simple. The author 
of ' Odes et Ballades ' was the greatest of French 
lyrists, making a stubborn and rebellious lan- 
guage soar and sing, and doing this easily, 
abundantly, unceasingly. 

It was the gift of poetry that Hugo had, 
and Tennyson, just as Munden had the gift of 
comedy, as Sheil had the gift of eloquence, as 
Turner had the gift of painting — just as Mr. 



2 26 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Du Maurier has the gift of story-telling. No 
doubt Mr. Du Maurier has other qualities also 
— a pleasant humor, for example, and broad 
sympathy ; but these would all be of little 
avail if he had not also the gift of story-telling. 
The possessor of this precious birthright seems 
to divine many of the secrets of the art of 
narrative almost intuitively, and he has no 
difficulty in holding our attention while he 
spins the yarn. However inexperienced he 
may be, he is rarely ineffective ; and at his 
first attempt he often does easily and without 
effort what those who have not the gift must 
take thought to accomplish, and attain only 
after striving and straining. 

The gift of story-telling all the most popular 
romancers of the time possess and must possess 
or else they would not have won popularity. 
And sometimes this gift is all their having. 
Sometimes they own little or no more, having 
neither wit nor wisdom, neither style nor psy- 
chology — possessing, indeed, no general ideas 
even about the art they practise with applause. 
This is how it comes to pass that more than 
one of the purveyors of popular fiction of our 
day has made a sorry spectacle of himself when 
he took it upon himself to discourse upon his 
own art and to discuss its secrets. The public 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 227 

had read his books because he was a born 
teller of tales, but for criticism of craftmanship 
he had no gift, and in attempting it he was 
merely giving himself away. 

As one glances down the long and interest- 
ing history of fiction, one can readily pick out 
the names of novelists belonging to one and 
another of the three classes. And yet the 
writer who has the gift of story-telling and 
nothing else, who has neither style nor humor 
nor the ability to create character, who is a 
spinner of yarns only, has no staying power ; 
however immense his immediate popularity 
may be, he sinks into oblivion almost as soon 
as he ceases to produce. Perhaps there are 
no more typical specimens of the story-teller 
pure and simple than the late Ponson du 
Terrail in France (the historian of the mis- 
deeds of Rocambole), and the late " Hugh 
Conway " in England (the author of ' Called 
Back '). Perhaps it would be invidious to point 
out any living writers of tales belonging in 
this class; and yet the temptation to name 
names is wellnigh irresistible. 

In the second division, containing those 
without the native faculty and yet with ability 
which they impress as a substitute for the 
gift, it is probably perfectly fair to include Dr. 



2 28 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Johnson. ' Rasselas' reveals no natural endow- 
ment for the pursuit of fiction ; it is the result 
of main strength misapplied. Perhaps also 
Diderot is to be included in this class, for the 
author of ' La Religieuse ' had the gift of story- 
telling as little as he had the dramaturgic 
faculty. It may be unfair to Diderot, whose 
intelligence was alert and swift, to link his 
name with that of Johnson, who moved pon- 
derously ; and yet they are both examples of 
the inadequacy of intellect alone as an equip- 
ment for the practice of an art without some 
portion, however slight, of natural endowment. 
For the spinning of yarns, the intelligence 
alone will not suffice. 

The two great contemporaries Boccaccio 
and Chaucer had both the gift of story-telling 
in fullest measure ; they were also among the 
most accomplished and most intellectual men 
of their time. Boccaccio was a scholar; he 
was perhaps the first Italian to study Greek ; 
he was chosen to deliver the earliest course of 
lectures on Dante. Chaucer was also a scholar ; 
he was a traveller and a man of affairs. Both 
of them were conscious artists, masters of the 
narrative art, treating the raw material they 
found ready to their hands with the utmost 
freedom, and understanding all the advan- 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 229 

tages of selection, unity, compression, variety, 
proportion, movement, and climax. Their 
tales can be studied to-day as masterpieces of 
craftsmanship. They had the gift of story- 
telling, and also the knowledge how best to 
put that having to usury, and how to make it 
return the fullest revenue. 

The two great writers whose names come 
next in chronological sequence in the history 
of fiction are Rabelais and Cervantes. The 
Frenchman and the Spaniard had a profounder 
philosophy of life than the Italian and the 
Englishman, but they lacked the sense of art, 
as the most careless contrast would show. The 
tales of Boccaccio and of Chaucer are swift 
and beautifully proportioned, while the stories 
of Rabelais and Cervantes are slow and lum- 
bering. The involute clumsiness of ' Don Quix- 
ote,' considered merely as a specimen of nar- 
rative art, is indisputable ; and the slovenliness 
of its structure, the negligence of the narrator, 
and his insufficient respect for the master- 
piece which he had begotten unawares, are 
equally evident. But careless as is the scheme 
of ' Don Quixote,' it is superior to the wilful 
and sprawling formlessness of the chronicle of 
1 Gargantua.' The gift of story - telling, the 
sheer ability to hold the reader's attention by 



230 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

a string of adventures, put together almost at 
hap-hazard, and told almost as artlessly — this 
both Rabelais and Cervantes must needs have 
had. 

There is no necessity now to attempt an 
analysis of this gift and a declaration of its 
constituent elements, even if it were possible 
to do so — which may be doubted. What is 
obvious enough is that it is sometimes accom- 
panied by the keenest understanding of the 
principles of narrative art, and sometimes it is 
not so accompanied. Those who possess it 
may also have knowledge and wisdom, or 
they may not own these additional qualifica- 
tions. But without some small share of this 
native faculty no novelist can hope to attain 
his purpose — no novelist, and no historian. 

The author of the ' Short History of the 
English People ' once defined the novel as 
" history that did not happen ;" and turning this 
happy suggestion inside out, we may call his- 
tory " fiction that did happen." Macaulay 
deliberately desired to write a history of Eng- 
land which should be read as eagerly as the 
latest novel, and he had his wish. Probably 
Green was inspired by a similar motive, and 
indubitably he achieved a similar triumph. 
The novel which Motley once wrote, and the 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 23 1 

novel which Parkman once wrote, failed to find 
favor in the eyes of the general reader, and 
dropped swiftly out of sight ; but yet who could 
deny the gift of story-telling to the historian 
of the siege of Antwerp, or to the historian of 
the conspiracy of Pontiac ? Prescott had the 
gift also when he told the most marvellous of 
all true stories, the tale of the conquest of 
Mexico by Cortez and his companions. Froude 
had it, even if he lacked other indispensable 
qualities of the great historian ; and — to take a 
long stride backward — Herodotus had it, even 
though he may have availed himself now and 
again of the novelist's other privileges. Xeno- 
phon revealed his possession of it more in his 
story of the retreat of the ten thousand, which 
was fact, than in his story of the training of 
Cyrus, which was fiction. 

Of course it will not do to force the classifi- 
cation too rigorously ; in art the hard and fast 
lines of science are impossible. None the less 
is it amusing to call the roll of English novel- 
ists, and, without insisting on an inexorable 
division of the sheep from the goats, to try 
and see which of them had this gift, and 
which of them had to make up for a defi- 
ciency of it by an abundance in other direc- 
tions. Defoe, for instance, like Le Sage, was 



232 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

a story-teller above all things ; he had this 
precious faculty in the highest degree, and 
perhaps he had little else. Swift had it in 
an equally full proportion, and he had many 
other things besides; indeed, the final proof 
of Swift's possession of this gift, were any 
needed, might be found in the fact that owing 
to it his bitter satire of his contemporaries, 
his misanthropic and malignant attack on 
humanity at large and for all time, survives 
now as a classic of childhood, and that the 
boys and girls of America in the nineteenth 
century read the travels of Lemuel Gulliver 
as innocently as they read the adventures of 
Robinson Crusoe, with no suspicion that be- 
neath the surface of the entrancing story there 
lies an evil allegory. This is a stroke of the 
irony of fate which Swift himself would appre- 
ciate. 

Of the three great English novelists of the 
eighteenth century perhaps Smollett had the 
most of this faculty, and Richardson the least, 
although Fielding had a richer nature than 
either of the others, and a finer art, and there- 
fore he got the utmost out of his having. 
Goldsmith's one attempt at fiction is engag- 
ingly artless and continually interesting ; Gold- 
smith, like Irving, who resembled him in 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 233 

many other respects also, had his full share of 
this native faculty, though he did not culti- 
vate it as carefully as Irving did. In like 
manner Cooper was a more conscientious 
workman than Scott, and he put his frame- 
work together better, inferior as the American 
romancer was to the Scottish master in rich- 
ness of humor and in insight into human char- 
acter. 

Of the three great British novelists of the 
nineteenth century Dickens was the only one 
who was a true story-teller, having a far larger 
share of the native gift even than Thackeray, 
while George Eliot had less of it than almost 
any other of those who have become famous 
as writers of fiction. Dickens was a man of 
limited culture and of narrow intelligence — 
as his ' Pictures from Italy ' proves, and his 
1 American Notes ' — and he had absurd artistic 
ideals ; but his was the faculty of telling a 
tale so that we cannot choose but hear. 
Thackeray, a more accomplished craftsman, 
was often a more careless artificer; he had 
a far finer intelligence than Dickens, and a 
deeper nature; but merely as a story-teller 
Dickens seems to me to be his superior. 

George Eliot (like Tolstoi, another great 
writer who uses fiction as a medium for 



234 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

morality) strikes me always as not naturally a 
teller of tales, like Swift, for instance, and 
Goldsmith. In reading ' Adam Bede ' and 
1 Middlemarch,' as in reading ' Anna Kar6nina,' 
we have a constant sense of effort, as though the 
authors were struggling with a consciousness 
that story-telling was not that for which they 
were born. That George Eliot and Tolstoi' 
were not wholly devoid of the requisite endow- 
ment is evident from these books and their 
fellows ; but the permanent value of George 
Eliot's writings and of Tolstoi's is not to be 
sought in their stories considered merely as 
stories. And if it were not that the * Sorrows 
of Werther ' had met with instant acceptance 
all over Europe, I should venture to suggest 
that, great as Goethe was, his gift of story- 
telling was singularly small. There is nothing 
easy or spontaneous about ' Wilhelm Meister,' 
as it is an effort of the intellect rather than a 
story. One might call it the first tendenz- 
roman — the first novel-with-a-purpose — if one 
could make out clearly what its purpose was. 
Certainly one can see in 'Wilhelm Meister' 
the ancestor of ' Daniel Deronda ' and of 
1 Robert Elsmere ' and of ' John Ward, Preach- 
er' — just as one can call Miss Austen the 
maiden grandmother of Mr. Howells. It is 



THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 235 

to be noted that Goethe, keen-sighted toward 
all things, saw himself also with clear eyes. 
He confessed to Eckermann that his tendency 
towards the practice of the plastic arts had 
been an error, since he had no natural dis- 
position towards them. 

(1894-; 



II.-CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 

M. Anatole France, one of the most 
discriminating and inconsequent of essayists, 
has suggested that criticism at its best is lit- 
tle more than a recital of the adventures of 
the critic's mind in contact with masterpieces. 
Perhaps one reason why criticism is so infre- 
quently at its best is that the critic's mind is 
in contact with masterpieces less often than it 
might be. It is with the writings of his con- 
temporaries that the critic has to deal for the 
most part ; and how few of any man's con- 
temporaries are masters ! It is only by return- 
ing resolutely again and again to the master- 
pieces of the past that a critic is able to sustain 
his standard and to prevent his taste from sink- 
ing to the level of the average of contempo- 
rary writing. 

And this return, always its own reward, is 
not without its own surprises. Either the 
accepted work is worthy of its high repute — 
and then there is the pleasure of expounding 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 237 

it afresh to a new generation and of showing 
its fitness to modern conditions despite its age 
— or else it is unworthy and lacks true dura- 
bility — and then there is the sad duty of ex- 
plaining how it deserved its fame once, and 
why it is now outworn. To one critic it hap- 
pened one summer to be reading ' Don Quix- 
ote ' (in Mr. Ormsby's nervous and satisfactory 
translation), when he received, by the same 
post, the ' Debacle ' of M. Emile Zola, and 
the ' Naulahka ' of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and 
the late Wolcott Balestier ; and when he had 
made an end of the perusal of these three 
books — the novel of the Spaniard, the novel 
of the Frenchman, and the novel of the British 
subject and the American citizen — it occurred 
to him that he had in them material for a litera- 
ry comparison not without a certain piquancy. 
To criticise these three books adequately would 
permit the writing of the history of fiction 
during the past three centuries ; it would au- 
thorize a thorough discussion of the princi- 
ples of the novelist's art, as these have been 
developed by the many mighty story-tellers 
who lived after Cervantes and before M. Zola. 
For a siege as formidable as this I have not 
the critical apparatus, even if I had the desire. 
The most that I can do here is to set down 



238 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

honestly and frankly a few of my impressions 
as I read in turn these three novels, strangely 
consorted and sharply contrasting. To sum 
up the merits of M. Zola's book is easy ; and 
it is not hard to form and to formulate an 
opinion about the Indo-American tale of the 
two young collaborators ; but the great work 
of Cervantes is not so lightly disposed of. 
The danger of any effort to record the advent- 
ures of the critic's mind in contact with a 
masterpiece like ' Don Quixote ' is that it is 
exceedingly difficult for the critic to be frank 
with himself or honest with his readers. His 
mind does not come squarely in contact with 
the masterpiece ; it is warded off by the cloud 
of commentators with whom every masterpiece 
is encompassed about. He can read only 
through the spectacles of the countless critics 
who have preceded him. He knows what he 
ought to think about ' Don Quixote,' and 
this makes it almost impossible for him to 
think for himself as he ought. 

For the critic in search of mental advent- 
ures, it is a safeguard to have a hearty distrust 
of philosophic criticism, so-called — to have a 
profound disbelief in the allegorical interpre- 
tation of simple stories. Cervantes was like 
all the other great makers of fiction in that 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 239 

he wrote first to amuse himself and to relieve 
himself, and only secondarily to amuse his 
readers, to move them, to instruct them even. 
" There is no mighty purpose in this book," 
is a proper motto for the title-page of most of 
the masterpieces in which philosophical criti- 
cism sees a myriad of mighty purposes, and 
which were written easily and carelessly and 
with no intention of creating a masterpiece, 
and with scarcely a thought of the message 
which the world has since deciphered between 
the lines. " He builded better than he knew " 
is true of most great writers ; perhaps it is not 
wholly true of Dante and of Milton, who were 
conscious artists always, and careful ; but it is 
absolutely true of Shakespeare and of Cer- 
vantes. In their pages we find many a moral 
which would surprise them ; and into their 
words we are forever reading meanings of our 
own of which they had never a suspicion. 
That ' Hamlet ' and ' Don Quixote ' yield 
up to us to-day meanings and morals their 
straightforward authors never intended, is per- 
haps the best possible evidence that 'Hamlet' 
and * Don Quixote ' are masterpieces. The 
work of art which has only the meaning and 
the moral its maker intended, is likely to be 
thin and barren. 




240 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

The author of ' Hamlet ' was like his close 
contemporary, the author of ' Don Quixote,' 
in that he thought less apparently of the great 
work which has survived in the affections of 
the world for two centuries and a half than 
he thought of his other writings, now recalled 
chiefly because they are due to the pen which 
gave us also the masterpieces. Obviously, 
Cervantes did not read the proof of ' Don 
Quixote,' the first editions of which abound in 
printer's errors almost as many and as serious 
as those which mar the first folio of Shake- 
speare. It would be easy to maintain the as- 
sertion that Cervantes set as little store by 
' Don Quixote ' as Shakespeare did by ' Ham- 
let ' and its fellows, the great Spaniard esteem- 
ing more highly his plays and his poems, just 
as Shakespeare seems to have cherished rather 
his poetry than his plays, each man holding 
lightly that which he had wrought most read- 
ily and with least effort. 

Indeed, the carelessness with which Cervantes 
has treated his masterpiece is one of the first 
things to strike a critic who reads the seven- 
teenth-century story with nineteenth-century 
fastidiousness. Conscious of the temerity of 
my opinion, and aware of the awful fate which 
may befall me for declaring it, I venture to 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 24 1 

suggest that the art of fiction is a finer art to- 
day than it was when 'Don Quixote ' was writ- 
ten. In the whole history of story-telling there 
is no greater name than the name of Cervantes ; 
but it would be a painful reflection on progress 
if the efforts of successive generations of nov- 
elists — however inferior to him any one of 
these might be — had not put the art forward. 
The writers of fiction nowadays are scrupu- 
lous where Cervantes was reckless ; they take 
thought where he gave none. Merely in the 
mechanism of plot, in the joinery of incident, 
in the craftsmanship of story -telling, 'Don 
Quixote ' is indisputably less skilful than M. 
Zola's 'Debacle,' or the Kipling-Balestier ' Nau- 
lahka ' — however inferior these may be in more 
vital points. 

Consider for a moment the awkward pre- 
tence of a translation from the manuscript of 
the Moor, Hamet Benengeli, as needless as it 
is ill-sustained. Consider the frank artlessness 
of the narrative, with its irrelevant tales in- 
jected into the manuscript merely because 
Cervantes happened to have them on hand. 
Consider the many anachronisms and incon- 
sistencies which Cervantes troubled himself 
about quite as little as Shakespeare thought 
or cared whether or not Bohemia was a desert 



242 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

country by the sea. Consider the extraordi- 
nary series of coincidences which brought to- 
gether at the inn four marvellously beautiful 
women, when the captive met his brother and 
Cardenio recovered Luscinda, all of which is 
improbable to the vanishing-point, and all of 
which, worse yet, has nothing whatever to do 
with the true subject of the story. Consider- 
ing all these slovenlinesses, it is impossible not 
to wonder whether the art of fiction did not 
retrograde with Cervantes, for both Boccaccio 
and Chaucer had attained vigor and supple- 
ness in narrative ; their tales were naif, no 
doubt, and direct, but they were always art- 
fully composed and presented. To this day 
the ' Decameron ' and the ' Canterbury Tales ' 
are models of simple story-telling. Great as 
are his other qualities, Cervantes, merely as a 
teller of tales, is as inferior to Boccaccio and to 
Chaucer as he is superior to Rabelais. 

It is in its humanity, in its presentation of 
men and women, in its character - drawing, as 
the modern phrase is, that the story of Cer- 
vantes excels all the stories of Boccaccio, of 
Chaucer, and of Rabelais. Alongside the gi- 
gantic figure of the Knight of La Mancha, 
what are the characters in the brilliant little 
comedies of Chaucer and of Boccaccio but 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 243 

thumb-nail sketches? What are Gargantua 
and Panurge but broad caricatures when 
compared with the delicately limned Don 
Quixote? Where, before, had any one put 
into fiction so much of our everyday humanity? 
And what, after all, do we seek in a novel, if 
it is not human nature? To catch mankind in 
the act, as it were ; to surprise the secrets of 
character and to show its springs ; to get into 
literature the very trick of life itself ; to dis- 
play the variety of human existence, its rich- 
ness, its breadth, its intensity ; to do these 
things with unforced humor, with unfailing 
good-humor, with good-will towards all men, 
with tolerance, with benignity, with loving 
kindness — this is what no writer of fiction had 
done before Cervantes wrote ' Don Quixote,' 
and this is what no writer of fiction has ever 
done better than Cervantes did it when he 
wrote ' Don Quixote.' 

Chaucer is shrewd and kindly at once, but 
even he lacks the commingled benevolence and 
worldly wisdom of Cervantes. The characters 
of the ' Canterbury Tales ' have a sharper out- 
line than the more softly rounded figures with 
whom Don Quixote is associated. Chaucer 
had a full share of the milk of human kind- 
ness, but there is the very cream of it in Cer- 



244 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

vantes. Perhaps there is no better test of the 
greatness of a humorist than this — that his 
humor has no curdling acidity. It is easy to 
amuse when there is a willingness to wound 
wantonly ; and Swift, though he may laugh 
and shake in Rabelais' easy-chair, does not fill 
that huge throne, because he has the pettiness 
of brutality. ' Gulliver ' is inferior to ' Gar- 
gantua ' in that the author of the former hated 
humanity, while the author of the latter loved 
his fellow-man, and took life easily and was 
happy. 

Cervantes was not a merry man, and he had 
a hard life, and perhaps he wrote his great 
book in prison ; but there is no discontent in 
1 Don Quixote.' There is a wholesome phi- 
losophy in it and a willingness to make the 
best of the world, a world which is not so bad, 
after all. ' Don Quixote' is a very long book, 
not so long as ' Amadis of Gaul,' or as the 
romances of Mademoiselle de Scudery, or as 
the ' Three Musketeers ' with its tail of sequels, 
but longer even than ' Daniel Deronda ' and 
than 'Robert Elsmere'; it is very long and 
it is crowded with characters, but among all 
these people there is no one man or woman 
whom the reader hates ; there is no one whom 
the author despises or insults. Cervantes is 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 245 

not severe with the children of his brain ; he 
loves them all ; he treats them all with the 
toleration which comes of perfect understand- 
ing. Here, indeed, is the quality in which 
he is most modern, in which he is still unsur- 
passable. Fielding caught it from him ; and 
Thackeray, who borrowed so many things 
from Fielding and so much, did not take over 
this also, or he could never have pursued and 
run down and harried Becky Sharp as he 
thought fit to do. 

Just as Fielding began 'Joseph Andrews' 
merely to guy Richardson's virtuous ' Pamela,' 
and just as he ended by falling in love with his 
own handiwork and by giving us the exquisite 
portrait of Parson Adams, so Cervantes, intend- 
ing at first little more than to break a lance 
with the knights of romance, came to respect 
his own work more and more, and to treat 
Don Quixote with increasing courtesy. Much 
of the first part is horse-play, fun of the most 
robust sort. The humor of physical misad- 
venture is rarely refined, and it takes a stout 
stomach to relish some of Don Quixote's ear- 
lier misfortunes. Even in the second part, 
the practical joke of the belled cats may fairly 
be called cruel, and it is altogether unworthy 
of the hero. Perhaps this is nineteenth-cen- 



246 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

tury hypercriticism, but Cervantes is to blame 
if he has presented to us a character so lovable 
that we revolt when any one takes an unfair 
advantage of Don Quixote. 

We do not resent the indignities which be- 
fall Sancho, for he has a tough hide and a 
stout heart and a mouth full of proverbs for 
his own consolation. Yet, in his way, the 
worthy squire is as lovable as the honorable 
knight he served. Just as Sam Weller (who 
made the success of the ' Pickwick Papers ') 
was an afterthought, so was Sancho, who owed 
his being apparently to the chance remark of 
the Landlord, that a knight should be attended 
by a squire. Nothing reveals the genius of 
Cervantes more plainly than the development 
of Sancho Panza, who was at first only a clown, 
nothing but a droll, a variant of the gracioso 
or low comedian accompanying the hero of 
every Spanish comedy. By degrees he is ele- 
vated from a mere mask into an actual man, 
the mouthpiece of our common humanity. 
The lofty Knight of La Mancha, with his im- 
possible aspirations, may be taken as a person- 
ification of the soul, while Sancho is the body 
— of the earth, earthy, and having his feet on 
the ground firmly. " There is a moral in ' Don 
Quixote,' " said Lowell, " and a very profound 



CERVANTES, ZOLA. KIPLING AND CO. 247 

one, whether Cervantes consciously put it there 
or not, and it is this : That whoever quarrels 
with the nature of things, wittingly or unwit- 
tingly, is certain to get the worst of it." San- 
cho had never a quarrel with the nature of 
things. 

Lowell also reminded us that " Cervantes is 
the father of the modern novel, in so far as it 
has become a study and delineation of char- 
acter, instead of being a narrative seeking to 
interest by situation and incident." ' Don 
Quixote ' is one of the most original of stories ; 
it had no predecessors of its kind, and it 
evolved itself by the spontaneous generation 
of genius. But its posterity is as ample as its 
ancestry was meagre. When we see Fielding's 
Parson Adams, or Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose, 
or Scott's Antiquary, we see children of Don 
Quixote. When we follow Mr. Pickwick in 
his foolish wanderings, when we listen to Tar- 
tarin of Tarascon telling of the lions he has 
slain, when we hear Col. Carter of Cartersville 
urging the desire of the Garden Spot of Vir- 
ginia for an outlet to the sea, we have before 
us the progeny of the Knight of the Sorrow- 
ful Countenance. The make-believe of Tom 
Sawyer in trying to get Jim out of prison in 
full accordance with the authorities recalls 



248 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Don Quixote's going mad in imitation of Or- 
lando ; and in the pages of an earlier Amer- 
ican humorist than Mark Twain, in Irving's 
1 Knickerbocker/ there is more than a hint of 
the manner of Cervantes. As Lowell puts it 
sharply, "the pedigrees of books are as inter- 
esting and instructive as those of men." 

If Cervantes was the father of the modern 
novel, we may wonder what he would think 
of some of his great -great -grandchildren. 
What, for example, would be his opinion of 
the ' Naulahka,' written by a Londoner who 
had been East and by a New-Yorker who had 
been West. Cervantes grew to manhood with 
the sons of the Conquistadores, with the men 
of iron who had won for Spain the golden 
lands of Mexico and Peru ; would he have 
foregathered with the Argonauts of Forty- 
nine? A scant half-century before his birth 
the Portuguese had pushed their way around 
Africa in search of Golconda and Cathay ; 
would he have been interested by this story of 
the West and the East ? 

Of one thing, indeed, we may fairly be cer- 
tain — that Cervantes would not have been at 
all surprised by the manner of the ' Naulahka,' 
for it is a tale of a kind he was abundantly 
familiar with. It is a story of a sort older by 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 249 

far than ' Don Quixote'; it is a story, in fact, 
of the sort that ' Don Quixote ' was written 
to satirize. In the new tale we have new 
dresses, of course, and new scenery and new 
properties, but the tale itself is the old, old 
story of the hero in search of adventures ; it 
is the tale of the hero always on the brink of 
death, but bearing a charmed life ; it is the 
tale of the hero skilled in all manner of sports, 
expert with all manner of weapons, fertile in 
resource and prompt in decision ; it is the 
tale, in short, of the bravura hero of concert- 
pitch romance. What is Tarvin of Topaz 
but Amadis of Gaul? What is the Crichton 
of Colorado but Palmerin of England, with all 
the modern improvements ? What is he but 
Belianis of Greece brought down to date ? 

The death-dealing and unkillable Tarvin may 
also be called a Yankee D'Artagnan. Like 
the Gascon hero, he goes in search of jewels 
of great price ; but he is a nobler hero even 
than Dumas's, for he is alone, while the three 
musketeers were always four. Tarvin, indeed, 
is the very acme of heroes, than which there 
can be no man more accomplished and ver- 
satile — not even Mr. Barnes of New York, 
or Mr. Potter of Texas. He is a real-estate 
boomer and an engineer; he has been a 



250 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

broncho-breaker and a telegraph operator ; he 
is a dead shot with a revolver, hitting a half- 
dollar spun in the air while keeping an easy- 
seat on a bucking horse. 

The main adventure in which the heroic 
Tarvin is engaged is simply childish ; the 
word need not be taken as a reproach — I 
merely mean that it is a thing to be told to 
amuse children. It is what the French call 
a conte a dormir debont. Like most of the 
romantic fiction of this late day, the ' Nau- 
lahka ' reveals rather invention than imagi- 
nation. It is ingeniously constructed ; it has 
not a little of the cleverness its authors have 
shown in other work; it has passages of 
beauty ; it gives the reader moments of ex- 
citement ; it is lighted now and again by- 
flashes of insight ; and, as a whole, it is a 
hollow disappointment. 

And the reason is not far to seek. It is be- 
cause romance of this sort is not what either 
of the collaborators did best. It is because 
neither Mr. Kipling nor his brother-in-law 
could put his whole strength into so hopeless a 
make-believe. Balestier was a realist ; beyond 
all question, the man who wrote the little tale 
of ' Reffey ' was a realist, with the imagination 
a true realist needs more than the ordinary 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 25 I 

romanticist. Mr. Kipling is sometimes a real- 
ist and sometimes an idealist ; he is a humor- 
ist often, and, when he is at his best, he is a 
poet also. Why did two such men join forces 
in a vain effort to pump the breath of life into 
a disestablished idol ? 

Of course, the ' Naulahka ' is not without 
touches of character worthy of the author of 
the ' Courting of Dinah Shadd,' although 
there is little or nothing in it really worthy of 
the author of the ' Gate of a Hundred Sor- 
rows ' and of ' Without Benefit of Clergy.' 
The gypsy queen is a fine conception, and her 
son is a live child, and the heir-apparent is 
also a human being ; all of these ring true. 
And here and there in the Indian chapters of 
the story are other evidences of Mr. Kipling's 
robust talent, of his knack of the unhackneyed 
epithet, of his power of revealing character as 
by a lightning flash. Perhaps it is due to the 
milder influence of his collaborator that there 
is in the ' Naulahka ' less of the bluster, of the 
swagger, of the precocious knowingness which 
made some of the ' Plain Tales from the Hills ' 
offensive in the eyes of those who do not like 
a style made up wholly of the primary colors. 
There is less also of the violence which was 
the key-note of the ' Light that Failed ' ; and 



252 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

Mr. Kipling is no longer looking for effects, 
immediate, obvious, and barbaric — like the ar- 
chitecture of the India his stories give us so 
strong a desire not to visit. 

While the ' Naulahka ' is, as I have said, 
the kind of a story which was popular a full 
century before ' Don Quixote ' was written, 
' La Debacle ' is the kind of a story which 
has come into fashion two and a half centuries 
after ' Don Quixote ' first appeared. If Cer- 
vantes would find himself at home in reading 
the adventures of Tarvin of Topaz, what would 
he think of M. Zola's solidly built and broadly 
painted panorama of the Second Empire's 
catastrophe? Perhaps, as an old soldier, as 
one who had fought at Lepanto, Cervantes 
would be most impressed by the sustained 
force of M. Zola's battle-pieces, than which 
there are none more vigorous in all fiction. 
Not Stendhal's Waterloo, not Victor Hugo's, 
not Thackeray's — done by indirection, but all 
the more moving for that — not Tolstoi's 
Sebastopol even, gives the reader so vivid a 
realization of the waste of war, of its destruc- 
tiveness, of the weariness of it and the hunger, 
of the horrors of every kind which are inevitable 
and necessary, and which M. Zola makes us feel 
more keenly than Callot could or Verestchagin. 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 253 

There is in ' La Debacle ' little of the realism 
M. Zola has praised, little or nothing of the 
naturalism he has proclaimed ; there is an 
epic simplicity, a mighty movement, a Cyclo- 
pean architecture not to be found in the 
work of any other novelist in all the luminous 
list of names since Cervantes. We have here 
no miniature portraits of dandy soldiers ; we 
have no mere genre - painting of troops in 
picturesque attitudes ; we have rather a series 
of masterly frescoes, brushed in boldly with 
a broad sweep of the arm, without hesitancy, 
with the consciousness of strength. M. Zola 
has Taine's faculty of accumulating typical 
details; he has the same power of handling 
immense masses of facts and of compelling 
each into its proper place ; and never has he 
used this faculty and this power to better 
advantage than in * La Debacle ' — not even in 
' Germinal.' 

The story is far too long; it has two hun- 
dred pages too many ; it is extended to include 
the last wild struggle of the Commune; it 
grows wearisome at last ; but what a splendid 
succession of pictures is presented to us before 
we feel the first fatigue ! We are made to see 
the incredible mismanagement of the imperial 
army, due to mingled knavery and incompe- 



254 



ASPECTS OF FICTION 



tence ; we are shown the complete collapse of 
the French commissariat and ordnance depart- 
ment ; we are made spectators of the moral 
disintegration of impending defeat as the 
French were shut in by the inexorable iron 
ring of the Germans ; we have brought before 
us the whole helpless empire, from the invalid 
monarch down to the privates and the peasants. 

The unending passage of the Prussian artil- 
lery through the village by night at a hard 
gallop ; the sudden vision, in the midst of the 
battle, of a peasant ploughing peacefully, in a 
hidden hollow — repeated again when the fight 
is over; the execution of Weiss under the 
eyes of his wife, after a defence of his house, 
which is a realization in words of the ' Last 
Cartridge'; the ghastly group of the dead 
Zouaves carousing ; the frantic charge of the 
riderless horses across the silent battle - field ; 
the assassination of Goliath in the presence of 
his child ; these are things which cling to the 
memory obstinately. These are scenes also 
which Cervantes would appreciate as he would 
appreciate the massive structure of 'La De- 
bacle ' when compared with the haphazard inci- 
dents and the hesitating plot of ' Don Quixote.' 

What Cervantes would most miss in M. 
Zola's book would be joyousness and humor. 



CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 255 

M. Zola has no humor, either positive or neg- 
ative — positive which breaks in upon the 
seriousness of the reader, or negative which 
prevents the author from taking himself too 
seriously. M. Zola has little joy in life, although 
he has softened of late. Once he saw all man- 
kind darkly, as though he hated humanity or 
despised it ; and the characters in his novels 
were etched by the acid of his malice. Now 
he uses a gentler crayon and he sketches with 
suaver outlines ; he is not unfair even towards 
the Germans. There are in ' La Debacle ' 
men and women we can like — although there 
is no one to love as we love Don Quixote and 
Sancho. Brutal is what M. Zola used to be, 
brutal and dirty. He is not brutal now and 
he is less dirty. He is still fond of foul words, 
and there are half a dozen of them repeated 
again and again in * La Debacle.' But as a 
whole, the story is surprisingly clean. There 
is nothing in it to shock Cervantes certainly, 
for he too could be plain-spoken at times — 
quite as plain-spoken as M. Zola. But what- 
ever his speech, however frank and hearty, 
however exactly he reproduces the vocabulary 
of the common people, the mind of Cervantes 
was always clean, pure, lofty. 
(1892.) 



III.— THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANCOIS 
COPPEE. 

Like Moliere, like Boileau, like Regnard, 
like Voltaire, and like Musset, M. Francois 
Coppee was born in Paris, and more than any 
other of the half-dozen is he a true child of 
the fair city by the Seine, loving her more 
ardently, and leaving her less willingly. The 
facts of his simple and uneventful career have 
been set forth by his friend M. de Lescure in 
'Francois Coppee: l'Homme, la Vie et l'CEu- 
vre (i 842-1 889).' From this we learn that 
the poet was born in 1842, that he was the 
youngest child of a poor clerk in the War De- 
partment, that he had three elder sisters, one 
of whom survives still to take care of her 
brother, that he spent most of his struggling 
childhood in old houses on the left (and 
more literary) bank of the Seine, that he was 
not an apt scholar in his youth, that he be- 
gan to write verses very early in his teens, 
and that at last his father died, and he sue- 



THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPPEE 257 

ceeded to the modest position in the War 
Department, becoming the head of the family 
at twenty-one. In time he made acquaintance 
with other young poets, and was admitted 
into the " Parnassians," as they were called 
— followers of Victor Hugo, of Theophile 
Gautier, of Theodore de Banville, students of 
new and old rhythms, and seekers after 
rich rymes, as ardent in the search as the Ar- 
gonauts of ' Forty-nine. M. Copp£e burned 
every one of his juvenile poems, and wrote 
many another of more cunning workmanship ; 
and of these newer poems two volumes were 
published in the next few years — ' Le Reli- 
quaire' and 'Les Intimites' — but they did 
not sell two hundred copies all told. 

Then, in 1869, came the first golden gleam 
of fortune. ' Le Passant,' a little one-act com- 
edy in verse, was acted one night at the Odeon, 
and the next day the name of Francois Cop- 
p6e was no longer unknown to any of those 
who care for letters. i Le Passant ' is unde- 
niably artificial, and at bottom it is probably 
forced in feeling, if not false ; but beyond all 
question the poet believed in it and accepted 
its truth, and delighted in his work. The sen- 
timent is charmingly youthful, with a spring- 
like freshness, and the versification is abso- 



258 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

lutely impeccable. For years M. Coppee was 
called " the author of ' Le Passant,' " until he 
came almost to hate his first-born. But only 
one of his later plays has rivalled it in popular 
acceptance ; this is the pathetic ' Luthier de 
Cremone,' of which there are several adapta- 
tions in English. A third one-act play, ' Le 
Pater/ forbidden in Paris by the stage censors, 
was, strangely enough, brought out here in 
New York at Daly's Theatre shortly after as 
the ' Prayer.' As a dramatist, M. Coppee con- 
tinues the romanticist tradition, now a little 
outworn ; and his longer plays lack the direct- 
ness of his later poems and prose tales. No 
one of them has had more than a merely hon- 
orable success, and no one of them — with a 
single exception only — has shown itself strong 
enough to stand the perils of translation. 

During the dark days of 1870 and 1871 M. 
Coppee did his duty in the ranks, like many 
another artist in letters and with the brush. 
Of course, he wrote war poems, both during 
the fighting and after, neither better nor worse, 
most of them, than the war poems of other 
French poets. Better than any of these mar- 
tial rymes are the ' Greve des Forgerons,' 
written just before the war, and ' Les Hum- 
bles/ a volume of verse written shortly after 



THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANCOIS COPPEE 259 

peace had been restored. The ' Greve des 
Forgerons' is a dramatic monologue, in which 
a striking iron-worker explains how it came 
to pass that he killed a man, and why he did 
the deed. It suggests Browning in its min- 
gling of movement and introspection, but it is 
neither as rugged in form nor as swift in ac- 
tion as the British poet would have made it. 

It is in ' Les Humbles' that there was first 
revealed the French poet with whom we of 
Anglo-Saxon stock can perhaps feel ourselves 
most in sympathy. The note which domi- 
nates the poems in that collection, and in most 
of M. Coppee's later volumes of verse, is less 
seldom found in English literature than in 
French. This is the note of sympathy with 
the lowly, with the unsuspected victims of 
fate. It is the note of compassion for those 
who struggle secretly and in vain, for those 
who are borne down beneath the burdens of 
commonplace existence, for those who have 
never had a chance in life. It is the note 
we mark now and again, for instance, in the 
deeper poems of Mr. Austin Dobson. Many 
of the foremost French authors of late years 
are mere mandarins, writing exclusively for 
their peers ; they are Brahmins, despising all 
outside their own high caste ; they are wholly 



260 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

without bowels of compassion for their fellow- 
man. Compare, for example, again, the con- 
temptuous and contemning attitude of Flau- 
bert towards the creatures of his own making, 
whom he regards distantly, as though they 
were doubtful insects under a microscope, and 
the warmer tolerance George Eliot shows even 
for her least worthy characters. 

M. Coppee is as detached from his humble 
heroes and heroines as any one could wish ; 
he is too profoundly an artist ever to intervene 
in his own person ; but he is not chill and 
inaccessible in his telling of their little lives, 
made up of a thousand banalities and lit by a 
single gleam of poetry, not cast by the glare 
of a great self-sacrifice, but falling from the 
pure flame of daily duties performed without 
thought of self. ' Les Humbles ' is but a 
gallery of pictures in the manner of the little 
masters of Holland — a series of portraits of 
the down -trodden in their every -day garb, 
with that suggestion of their inner life which 
illuminates every painting by an artist of true 
insight. In the old-fashioned sense of the 
word there is little " heroic" in ' Les Humbles;' 
and there is absolutely nothing of the exag- 
gerated larger- than - life - and - twice- as - natural 
manner of Victor Hugo, set off with violent 



THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANCOIS COPPEE 26 1 

contrasts and startling antitheses. Instead 
we have an accomplished poet telling us of the 
simple lives of the poor in the simple speech 
of the people. M. Coppee has a homeliness 
of phrase not unlike that of Theocritus, but 
perhaps less consciously literary. 

Indeed, nothing more clearly shows the 
delicacy of his art than his extraordinary skill 
in concealing all trace of artifice, so that a 
most carefully constructed poem is seemingly 
spontaneous. To most of us French poetry 
is rarely interesting ; it is obviously artificial ; 
it strikes us as somewhat remote ; possibly 
from the enforced use of words of Romance 
origin (which therefore seem to us secondary) 
to describe heartfelt emotion, expressed by 
us in words of Teutonic stock (which are 
therefore to us primary). Lowell has told 
us that it is only the high polish of French 
verse that keeps out decay. We do not feel 
this in reading the best of M. Coppee's poetry ; 
it seems to us as natural an outgrowth almost 
as Heine's or Longfellow's. In another essay 
Lowell says that perhaps the great charm of 
Gray's ' Elegy ' is to be found " in its embody- 
ing that pensively stingless pessimism which 
comes with the first gray hair, that vague 
sympathy with ourselves which is so much 



262 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

cheaper than sympathy with others, that placid 
melancholy which satisfies the general appe- 
tite for an emotion that titillates rather than 
wounds." That M. Coppee has put into 
French verse, unmusical as it is, the qualities 
which Lowell finds in Gray's ' Elegy ' is evi- 
dence that neither in manner nor in matter 
is he like most French poets. 

But this acceptability of his poetry to ears 
attuned to more Teutonic rhythms has not 
been won by any accidental dereliction from 
the strictest rule of the Parnassians. M. Coppee 
has besieged and captured the final fastnesses 
of French metrical art, and his work is com- 
pletely satisfactory even to Banville, who be- 
strides his hobby of " rich " rymes as though 
it were Pegasus itself. M. Coppee early gave 
proof of remarkable skill at the difficult game 
of French versification, and he still plays it 
scientifically, and with great good luck. Of 
late years he has been called upon frequently 
to sing to order, to write verses for a celebra- 
tion, and he has always been as ready as Dr. 
Holmes was once to lay a garland of rymes 
on the grave of a hero. The art of writing 
occasional verse which shall be worthy of the 
occasion is not a common gift. M. Coppee 
possesses it abundantly, and his many poems 



THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPPEE 263 

for feasts or fasts are always appropriate, ade- 
quate, and dignified. 

1 Olivier ' is M. Coppee's most ambitious 
longer poem. But it is not in his longer poems 
that he is seen at his best. What he does to 
perfection is the conte en vers — the tale in verse. 
The conte is a form of fiction in which the 
French have always delighted, and in which 
they have always excelled, from the days of 
the jongleurs and the trouveres, past the periods 
of La Fontaine and Voltaire, down to the pres- 
ent. The conte is a tale something more than 
a sketch, it may be, and something less than a 
short story. In verse it is at times but a mere 
rymed anecdote, or it may attain almost to 
the direct swiftness of a ballad. The ' Canter- 
bury Tales ' are contes most of them, if not all, 
and so are some of the ' Tales of a Way-side 
Inn.' The free-and-easy tales of Prior were 
written in imitation of the French conte en vers; 
and that likewise was the model of more than 
one of the lively narrative poems of Mr. Austin 
Dobson. 

No one has succeeded more admirably in the 
conte en vers than M. Coppee. Where was 
there ever anything better of its kind than 
'L'Enfant de la Balle ' ? — that gentle portrait 
of the infant phenomenon, framed in a chain of 



264 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

occasional gibes at the sordid ways of theatrical 
managers, and at their hostility toward poetic 
plays. Where is there anything of a more 
simple pathos than ' L'Epave ' ? — that story of 
a sailor's son whom the widowed mother vain- 
ly strives to keep from the cruel waves that 
killed his father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis 
that although the ship M. Coppee loves best is 
that which sails the blue shield of the city of 
Paris, he knows the sea also, and he depicts 
sailors with affectionate fidelity.) But whether 
at the sea-side by chance, or more often in the 
streets of the city, the poet seeks for the sub- 
ject of his story some incident of daily occur- 
rence made significant by his interpretation ; he 
chooses some character commonplace enough, 
but made firmer by conflict with evil and by 
victory over self. Those whom he puts into 
his poems are still the humble, the forgotten, 
the neglected, the unknown, and it is the feel- 
ings and the struggles of these that he tells us, 
with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no 
dead-set at our sensibilities. The sub -title 
Mrs. Stowe gave to ' Uncle Tom's Cabin ' would 
serve to cover most of M. CoppeVs contes either 
in prose or verse ; they are nearly all pictures 
of "life among the lowly." But there is no 
forcing of the note in his painting of poverty 



THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPP^E 265 

and labor; there is no harsh juxtaposition of 
the blacks and the whites. The tone is always 
manly and wholesome. 

' La Marchande de Journaux ' and the other 
little masterpieces of story-telling in verse are 
unfortunately untranslatable, as are all poems 
but a lyric or two now and then by a happy 
accident. A translated poem is a boiled straw- 
berry, as some one once brutally put it. But 
the tales which M. Coppee has written in prose 
— a true poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, flex- 
ible, and firm — these can be Englished by tak- 
ing thought and time and pains, without which 
a translation is always a betrayal. Ten of these 
tales have been rendered into English by Mr. 
Learned, and the ten chosen for translation 
are among the best of the twoscore and more of 
M. Coppee's contes en prose. These ten tales 
are fairly representative of his range and va- 
riety. Compare, for example, the passion in 
the ' Foster-sister ' — pure, burning, and fatal — ■ 
with the Black Forest naivete of the • Wooden 
Shoes of Little Wolff.' Contrast the touching 
pathos of the ' Substitute,' poignant in his mag- 
nificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who 
has conquered his shameful past goes back 
willingly to the horrible life he has fled from, 
that he may save from a like degradation and 



266 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

from an inevitable moral decay the one friend 
he has in the world, all unworthy as this friend 
is — contrast this with the story of the gigantic 
deeds ' My Friend Meutrier' boasts about un- 
ceasingly, not knowing that he has been dis- 
covered in his little round of daily domestic 
duties — making the coffee of his good old 
mother, and taking her poodle out for a 
walk. 

Among these ten there are tales of all sorts, 
from the tragic adventure of ' An Accident ' to 
the pendant portraits of the ' Two Clowns,' cut- 
ting in its sarcasm, but not bitter; from the 
1 Captain's Vices,' which suggests at once 
George Eliot's ' Silas Marner ' and Mr. Austin 
Dobson's ' Tale of Polypheme,' to the sombre 
reverie of the poet ' At the Table,' a sudden 
and searching light cast on the labor and mis- 
ery which underlie the luxury of our complex 
modern existence. Like 'At the Table,' the 
' Dramatic Funeral ' is a picture more than it 
is a story ; it is a marvellous reproduction of 
the factitious emotion of the good-natured 
stage-folk, who are prone to overact even their 
own griefs and joys. The ' Dramatic Funeral ' 
seems to me always as though it might be a 
painting of M. Jean B£raud, that most Parisian 
of artists, just as certain stories of Maupas- 



THE PROSE TALES OF If. FRANQOIS COPPEE 267 

sant's inevitably suggest the bold freedom of 
M. Forain's sketches in black and white. 

An ardent admirer of the author of the stones 
in the ■ Odd Number ' has protested to me 
that M. Coppee is not an etcher like .Mau- 
passant, but rather a painter in water-colors. 
And why not ? Thus might we call M. Alphonse 
Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does 
he suggest the very bloom of color. No doubt 
M. Coppee's contes have not the sharpness of 
Maupassant's nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's. 
But what of it ? They have qualities of their 
own. They have sympathy, poetry, and a 
power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I 
think, by those of either Maupassant or M. 
Daudet. M. Coppee's street views in Paris, 
his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life 
under the shadow of Notre Dame, are con- 
vincingly successful. They are intensely to 
be enjoyed by those of us who take the same 
keen delight in the varied phases of life in 
New York. They are not, to my mind, really 
rivalled either by those of Maupassant, who 
was a Norman by birth and a nomad by 
choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a 
native of Provence, although now for thirty 
years a resident of Paris. M. Coppee is a 
Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose 



268 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

he is a poet. Perhaps this is why his pict- 
ures of Paris are unsurpassable in their felicity 
and in their verity. 

It may be fancy, but I seem to see also a 
finer morality in M. Coppee's work than in 
Maupassant's, or in M. Daudet's, or in that of 
almost any other of the Parisian story-tellers 
of to-day. In his tales we breathe a purer 
moral atmosphere, more wholesome and more 
bracing. It is not that M. Copp6e probably 
thinks of ethics rather than esthetics ; in this 
respect his attitude is undoubtedly that of the 
others. There is no sermon in his song, or at 
least none for those who will not seek it for 
themselves ; there is never a hint of a preach- 
ment. But for all that, I have found in his 
work a trace of the tonic morality which in- 
heres in Moliere, for example — also a Parisian 
by birth — and in Rabelais, too, despite his dis- 
guising grossness. This finer morality comes 
possibly from a wider and a deeper survey of 
the universe ; and it is as different as possible 
from the morality which is externally applied, 
and which always punishes the villain in the 
fifth act. 

It is of good augury for our own letters that 
the best French fiction of to-day is getting it- 
self translated in the United States, and that 



THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPPEE 269 

the liking for it is growing apace. Fiction is 
more consciously an art in France than any- 
where else, perhaps partly because the French 
are now foremost in nearly all forms of artistic 
endeavor. In the short story especially, in 
the tale, in the conte, their supremacy is incon- 
testable, and their skill is shown and their 
esthetic instinct exemplified partly in the 
sense of form, in the constructive method 
which underlies the best short stories, how- 
ever trifling these may appear to be, and part- 
ly in the rigorous suppression of non-essen- 
tials, due in a measure, it may be, to the 
example of Merimee. That is an example 
we in America may study to advantage, and 
from the men who are writing fiction in 
France we may gain much. 
(1890.) 



IV.-THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC 
HALEVY 

To most American readers of fiction I fan- 
cy that M. Ludovic Halevy is known chiefly, 
if not solely, as the author of that most 
charming of modern French novels, the * Abbe" 
Constantin.' Some of these readers may have 
disliked this or that novel of M. Zola's be- 
cause of its bad moral, and this or that novel 
of M. Ohnet's because of its bad taste, but 
all of them were delighted to discover in M. 
Halevy 's interesting and artistic work a story 
written by a French gentleman for young 
ladies. Here and there a scoffer might sneer 
at the tale of the old French priest and the 
young women from Canada as innocuous but 
saccharine; but the story of the good Abbe 
Constantin and of his nephew, and of the girl 
the nephew loved in spite of her American 
millions — this story had the rare good fortune 
of pleasing at once the broad public of indis- 
criminate readers of fiction and the narrower 



THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY 271 

circle of real lovers of literature. Artificial 
the atmosphere of the tale might be, but it 
was with an artifice at once delicate and de- 
licious ; and the tale itself won its way into the 
hearts of the women of America as it had into 
the hearts of the women of France. 

There is even a legend — although how solid 
a foundation it may have in fact I do not dare 
to discuss — there is a legend that the lady- 
superior of a certain convent near Paris was 
so fascinated by the 'Abbe Constantin,' and 
so thoroughly convinced of the piety of its 
author, that she ordered all his other works, 
receiving in due season the lively volumes 
wherein are recorded the sayings and doings 
of Monsieur and Madame Cardinal, and of 
the two lovely daughters of Monsieur and 
Madame Cardinal. To note that these very 
amusing studies of certain aspects of life in 
a modern capital originally appeared in that 
extraordinary journal La Vie Parisienne — now 
sadly degenerate — is enough to indicate that 
they are not precisely what the good lady- 
superior expected to receive. We may not 
say that the ' Famille Cardinal ' is one of the 
books every gentleman's library should be 
without ; but to appreciate its value requires 
a far different knowledge of the world and of 



272 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

its wickedness than is needed to understand 
the ' Abbe Constantin.' 

Yet the picture of the good priest and the 
portraits of the little Cardinals are the work 
of the same hand, plainly enough. In both 
of these books, as in ' Criquette ' (M. Halevy's 
only other novel), as in 'A Marriage for Love ' 
and the two-score other short stories he has 
written during the past thirty years, there are 
the same artistic qualities, the same sharpness 
of vision, the same gentle irony, the same con- 
structive skill, and the same dramatic touch. 
It is to be remembered always that the author 
of the ' Abbe Constantin ' is also the half- 
author of ' Froufrou ' and of ' Tricoche et Ca- 
colet,' as well as of the librettos of the ' Belle 
Helene ' and of the ' Grande Duchesse de 
Gerolstein.' 

In the two novels, as in the two-score short 
stories and sketches — the contes and the nou- 
velles which are now spring-like idyls and now 
wintry episodes, now sombre etching and now 
gayly colored pastels — in all the works of the 
story-teller we see the firm grasp of the dram- 
atist. The characters speak for themselves ; 
each reveals himself with the swift directness 
of the personages of a play. They are not 
talked about and about, for all analysis has 



THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY 273 

been done by the playwright before he rings 
up the curtain in the first paragraph. And 
the story unrolls itself, also, as rapidly as 
does a comedy. The movement is straight- 
forward. There is the cleverness and the in- 
genuity of the accomplished dramatist, but the 
construction has the simplicity of the high- 
est skill. The arrangement of incidents is so 
artistic that it seems inevitable; and no one 
is ever moved to wonder whether or not the 
tale might have been better told in different 
fashion. 

Nephew of the composer of ' La Juive ' — an 
opera not now heard as often as it deserves, 
perhaps — and son of a playwright no one of 
whose productions now survives, M. Hal£vy 
grew up in the theatre. At fourteen he was on 
the free-list of the Opera, the Opera Comique, 
and the Odeon. After he left school and went 
into the civil service his one wish was to write 
plays, and so to be able to afford to resign 
his post. In the civil service he had an inside 
view of French politics, which gave him a dis- 
taste for the mere game of government with- 
out in any way impairing the vigor of his pa- 
triotism — as is proved by certain of the short 
stories dealing with the war of 1870 and the 
revolt of the Paris Communists. And while 



274 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

he did his work faithfully, he had spare hours 
to give to literature. He wrote plays and 
stories, and they were rejected. The manager 
of the Odeon declared that one early play of 
M. Halevy's was exactly suited to the Gym- 
nase, and the manager of the Gymnase pro- 
tested that it was exactly suited to the Odeon. 
The editor of a daily journal said that one 
early tale of M. Halevy's was too brief for a 
novel, and the editor of a weekly paper said 
that it was too long for a short story. 

In time, of course, his luck turned ; he had 
plays performed and stories published ; and at 
last he met M. Henri Meilhac, and entered on 
that collaboration of nearly twenty years' du- 
ration to which we owe ' Froufrou ' and ' Tri- 
coche et Cacolet ' on the one hand, and on the 
other the books of Offenbach's most brilliant 
operas — ' Barbebleue,' for example, and ' La 
Perichole.' When this collaboration termi- 
nated, shortly before M. Halevy wrote the 
1 Abbe Constantin,' he gave up writing for the 
stage. The training of the playwright he could 
not give up, if he would, nor the intimacy with 
the manners and customs of the people who 
live, move, and have their being on the far side 
of the curtain. 

Obviously M. Halevy is fond of the actors 



THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY 275 

and the actresses with whom he spent the years 
of his manhood. They appear again and again 
in his tales ; and in his treatment of them there 
is never anything ungentlemanly, as there was 
in M. Jean Richepin's volume of theatrical 
sketches. M. Halevy's liking for the men 
and women of the stage is deep ; and wide is 
his knowledge of their changing moods. The 
young Criquette and the old Karikari and the 
aged Dancing - master — he knows them all 
thoroughly, and he likes them heartily, and he 
sympathizes with them cordially. Indeed, no- 
where can one find more kindly portraits of the 
kindly player-folk than in the writings of this 
half-author of ' Froufrou ' ; it is as though the 
successful dramatist felt ever grateful towards 
the partners of his toil, the companions of his 
struggles. He is not blind to their manifold 
weaknesses, nor is he the dupe of their easy 
emotionalism, but he is tolerant of their fail- 
ings, and towards them, at least, his irony is 
never mordant. 

Irony is one of M. Halevy's chief character- 
istics, perhaps the chiefest. It is gentle when 
he deals with the people of the stage — far 
gentler then than when he is dealing with the 
people of society, with fashionable folk, with 
the aristocracy of wealth. When he is telling 



276 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

us of the young loves of millionaires and of 
million-heiresses, his touch may seem caressing, 
but for all its softness the velvet paw has claws 
none the less. It is amusing to note how often 
M. Halevy has chosen to tell the tale of love 
among the very rich. The heroine of the 
' Abbe Constantin ' is immensely wealthy, as 
we all know, and immensely wealthy are the 
heroines of ' Princesse,' of 'A Grand Marriage,' 
and of ' In the Express.' Sometimes the heroes 
and the heroines are not only immensely 
wealthy, they are also of the loftiest birth ; 
such, for instance, are the young couple whose 
acquaintance we make in ' Only a Waltz.' 

There is no trace or taint of snobbery in M. 
Halevy's treatment of all this magnificence ; 
there is none of the vulgarity which marks the 
pages of ' Lothair,' for example ; there is no 
mean admiration of mean things. There is, 
on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging 
satire. He lets us see that all this luxury is a 
little cloying, and perhaps not a little enervat- 
ing. He suggests (although he takes care never 
to say it) that perhaps wealth and birth are not 
really the best the world can offer. The amia- 
ble egotism of the hero of ' In the Express,' 
and the not unkindly selfishness of the heroine 
of that most Parisian love-story, are set before 



THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY 277 

us without insistence, it is true, but with an 
irony so keen that even he who runs as he 
reads may not mistake the author's real opinion 
of the characters he has evoked. 

To say this is to say that M. Halevy's irony 
is delicate and playful. There is no harshness 
in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We 
do not find in his pages any of the pessimism 
which is perhaps the dominant characteristic 
of the best French fiction of our time. To 
M. Halevy, as to every thinking man, life is 
serious, no doubt, but it need not be taken 
sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems 
still enjoyable, as it must to most of those who 
have a vivid sense of humor. He is not dis- 
illusioned utterly, he is not reduced to the 
blankness of despair as are so many of the 
disciples of Flaubert, who are cast into the 
outer darkness, and who hopelessly revolt 
against the doom they have brought on them- 
selves. 

Indeed, it is Merimee that M. Halevy would 
hail as his master, and not Flaubert, whom 
most of his fellow French writers of fiction 
follow blindly. Now, while the author of 
* Salammbo ' was a romanticist turned sour, 
the author of ' Carmen ' was a sentimentalist 
sheathed in irony. To Gustave Flaubert the 



278 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

world was hideously ugly, and he wished it 
strangely and splendidly beautiful, and he de- 
tested it the more because of his impossible 
ideal. To Prosper Merim£e the world was 
what it is, to be taken and made the best of, 
every man keeping himself carefully guarded. 
Like Merim£e, M. Hal6vy is detached, but he 
is not disenchanted. His work is more joyous 
than MerimeVs, if not so vigorous and com- 
pact, and his delight in it is less disguised. 
Even in the Cardinal sketches there is noth- 
ing that leaves an acrid after -taste, nothing 
corroding — as there is not seldom in the 
stronger and sterner short stories of Maupas- 
sant. 

More than Maupassant or Flaubert or M£ri- 
mee is M. Hal£vy a Parisian. Whether or not 
the characters of his tale are dwellers in the 
capita], whether or not the scene of his story 
is laid in the city by the Seine, the point of 
view is always Parisian. The Circus Charger 
did his duty in the stately avenues of a noble 
country place, and Blacky performed his task 
near a rustic waterfall ; but the men who record 
their intelligent actions are Parisians of the 
strictest sect. Even in the patriotic pieces 
called forth by the war of 1870, in the ' Insur- 
gent ' and in the ' Chinese Ambassador,' it is the 



THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY 279 

siege of Paris and the struggle of the Commu- 
nists which seem to the author most important. 
His style even, his swift and limpid prose — the 
prose which somehow corresponds to the best 
vers de societe in its brilliancy and buoyancy — 
is the style of one who lives at the centre of 
things. Cardinal Newman once said that while 
Livy and Tacitus and Terence and Seneca 
wrote Latin, Cicero wrote Roman; so while 
M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet 
on the other, may write French, M. Halevy 
writes Parisian. 

(i§93) 



V.-MR. CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER AS A 
WRITER OF FICTION 

The late Matthew Arnold had a far wider 
outlook than any of his contemporaries among 
British critics, but none the less was he ca- 
pable of insularity on occasion, as when he 
made his taunting remark about the people of 
the United States reading the works of " a 
native author named Roe " rather than the 
masterpieces of literature — the remark being 
made at the very moment when the people 
of Great Britain were reading the works of a 
native author named Haggard, when the peo- 
ple of France were reading the works of a 
native author named Ohnet, and when the 
people of Germany were reading the works 
of a native author named " Marlitt." And 
yet a few years before the distinguished critic 
sneered thus inexpensively at this transient 
failing of ours, which happened to have at 
the time an equivalent in every other coun- 
try, there was another American weakness 



MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 281 

at which he could have girded more effec- 
tively. This weakness was an uneasy desire 
for a strange and portentous work of fic- 
tion which was to be hailed at once, on its 
appearance, as The Great American Novel. 
The satirist would have had a fair target in 
this parochial expectancy of the impossible. 
How should there ever be so monstrous an 
entity as The Great American Novel ? Is 
there such a thing as The Great British 
Novel, or The Great French Novel ? And 
if there is, what is the name thereof, and 
who proclaimed and proved its unique great- 
ness? 

It is pleasant to observe that this silly 
demand for an impossible object, frequent 
enough when we had no novelists, or very 
few, has died away now that we have a com- 
pact corps of trained writers of fiction — a 
corps in which promising recruits are enlisted 
almost every month. These conscripts in 
story-telling are often veterans in other divis- 
ions of the literary body ; and they are drawn 
especially from the rapidly thinning ranks of 
the essayists. It may be doubted whether 
the historians of literature have hitherto paid 
sufficient attention to the strong influence of 
the English essayists upon the development 



282 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

of the English novel. Addison and Steele 
made the way straight for Henry Fielding and 
for Jane Austen. ' Rasselas ' and the ' Vicar 
of Wakefield ' are simply numbers of \hz Ram- 
bler and of the Citizen of the World somewhat 
expanded. So Curtis, after the ' Potiphar 
Papers,' wrote ' Prue and I ' and ' Trumps ' ; 
so Mr. Howells, after ' Suburban Sketches,' 
set out on ' Their Wedding Journey ' and 
formed ' A Chance Acquaintance '; so Mr. 
Charles Dudley Warner, after spending a 
' Summer in a Garden,' and after making a 
series of ' Back-Log Studies,' went away also 
on ' Their Pilgrimage,' and took part in ' A 
Little Journey in the World.' 

It was Moore who pointed out in his me- 
moir of Sheridan that English comedy had 
been the work of very young men — which 
would tend to account for its vivacity, per- 
haps, and for its immaturity also. That the 
novelists of our language have, on the con- 
trary, flowered later in life, more often than 
not, has also been noted before now. Richard- 
son was fifty when he celebrated the triumph 
of virtue in ' Pamela ' ; Fielding was thirty- 
five when he made fun of poor Pamela by 
giving her a brother, ' Joseph Andrews'; 
Scott was forty when he finally finished 



MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 283 

' Waverley ' ; Thackeray did not begin ' Van- 
ity Fair,' and George Eliot did not sketch 
the first of her ' Scenes of Clerical Life,' until 
they had reached one-half of the allotted limit 
of threescore years and ten ; and Mr. Howells 
was about the same age when he took his 
first timid flight in fiction with ' Their Wed- 
ding Journey.' Mr. Warner was older than 
Richardson when he turned story-teller and 
■wrote the fascinating journal of ' Their Pil- 
grimage,' and he was full sixty when he fol- 
lowed this travel tale with a full-fledged novel, 
<A Little Journey in the World.' Like Field- 
ing and Scott, like Thackeray and Mr. How- 
ells, Mr. Warner had made proof of his liter- 
ary faculty long before he ventured into the 
doubtful labyrinth of fiction, wherein the most 
accomplished man of letters may lose his way 
if he cannot keep a firm grasp of the thread 
of interest, the only clew which can guide him 
and his readers to a joyful safety. 

It is characteristic of Mr. Warner's modesty 
that even now, when he has come to his re- 
ward, when he has made a hit as a humorist, 
when he has been welcomed as a writer of 
travels, when he has won a place for himself 
in the front rank of essayists, when he has 
appeared thrice as a novelist, that he is wont 



284 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

to speak of himself not as a man of letters, 
but as a journalist. His career has the unex- 
pectedness to be discovered in the lives of so 
many energetic Americans who set out in one 
direction and then go suddenly in another — 
reaching their original goal in the end, it may 
be, but only after a circumnavigation of the 
globe. Born in Massachusetts in 1829, grad- 
uating from Hamilton in 185 1, he lived on 
the frontier for a year or two, and then studied 
law at the University of Pennsylvania — al- 
though I must confess that the critic who sits 
in the Editor's Study does not look in the 
least like the " Philadelphia lawyer " of popu- 
lar fancy. He practised law in Chicago until 
i860, when he went to Hartford to take charge 
of a paper since consolidated with the Courant 
(in which Mr. Warner is still interested). 

It was in the spring of 1870 that Mr. Warner 
began to contribute to the Courant a series of 
papers chronicling the experiences and the mis- 
adventures of an amateur gardener. Amusing 
as these little essays were, they had none of 
the " acrobatic comedy" (as it has been called) 
of the ordinary newspaper funny man, who 
has his easily learned formulas for extracting 
laughs. The humor of Mr. Warner's record 
of his tribulations in the garden was not 



MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 285 

machine-made; it was original, individual, 
delicate, playful, and at bottom thoughtful ; 
it was the easy fooling of a gentleman and a 
scholar. It happened to hit the popular taste, 
and the successive papers were copied far and 
wide, and quoted and talked about, and finally 
gathered into a book, for which Henry Ward 
Beecher wrote a preface — omitted from the 
later editions now that Mr. Warner has ceased 
to need an introduction. ' My Summer in a 
Garden ' was popular not only in the United 
States but in Great Britain as well, where, 
indeed, three rival publishers showed their 
appreciation by reprinting it promptly. One 
of these gentry even changed the title and 
chose to call the little book 'Pusley'; but 
no one of the three thought it needful to 
transmit any pecuniary honorarium to the 
American author, in spite of the fact that it 
was even then possible to make transfers of 
money by the Atlantic cable. 

After the success of ' My Summer in a 
Garden,' the author bound up in a book a 
selection of ' Saunterings,' an apt title for 
sketches of travel. Then he wrote a series of 
1 Back -Log Studies,' suggested possibly by 
the 'Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,' and 
possibly by the ' Reveries of a Bachelor,' and 



286 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

possibly owing nothing to either of these, for 
it was full of what we now know to be the 
flavor of Mr. Warner's own personality. The 
first requisite of an essayist, the one thing 
needful, without which he is as nothing, is to 
have his own point of view, to own himself, 
to be his own master. The artist, so Goethe 
tells us, " make what contortions he will, can 
bring to light only his own individuality"; 
Mr. Warner is no literary contortionist, and 
it is without violence or wrench that he brings 
his individuality to light. The more amusing 
side of this individuality had been shown in 
1 My Summer in a Garden,' and it was rather 
the deeper aspect which was first revealed in 
' Back-Log Studies,' wherein the wit and the 
humor flame up and crackle and sparkle, 
while the thought beneath glows and burns 
steadily. 

Probably Mr. Warner himself would not ap- 
prove of any suggestion that all his various writ- 
ings, his editorial articles, his essays, his books 
of travels, his biographies, his social studies — 
or at least such of them as had appeared be- 
fore 1 8 86 — were merely preparations for their 
author's first venture into fiction. But cer- 
tainly, and whatever their value may be in 
other respects, they were each in its different 



MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 287 

degree advantageous to him when he took up 
the new art of story-telling. In writing them 
Mr. Warner had trained his eye and his hand ; 
he had proved his weapons, and he had meas- 
ured himself. The change of the essayist into 
the novelist was a slow development, and not 
a sudden expansion, as had been the change 
of the lawyer into the journalist a quarter of 
a century before. He could not but be aware 
that he had the literary faculty in a high de- 
gree; it remained to be seen whether he had 
also the gift of story-telling, without which 
the novelist is as naught. 

It does not seem to me that this crucial 
question is answered in ' Their Pilgrimage.' 
In this first attempt Mr. Warner was diffident 
and modest. While there is more incident in 
1 Their Pilgrimage' than there was in Curtis's 
first attempt at fiction, the ' Potiphar Papers,' 
and more even than there is in Mr. Howells's 
' Their Wedding Journey,' still the book is 
hardly to be classed among novels, unless, in- 
deed, there were a separate division for topo- 
graphic fiction. It is the record of a voyage 
of discovery among the American summer 
resorts, extending from Bar Harbor to the 
White Sulphur, and including Saratoga and 
Long Branch, Newport and Narragansett Pier 



288 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

and Niagara. It was natural that the essayist 
turning novelist should be a portrayer of social 
conditions rather than a story-teller, pure and 
simple. He has a story to tell, of course (he 
is no needy knife-grinder), and he tells it well, 
bringing the hero to the proposal promptly, 
and allowing the heroine the cherished privi- 
lege of self-sacrifice ; but none the less are 
we allowed to guess that the shifting pano- 
rama is almost as interesting as are the fig- 
ures making love in the foreground. Now and 
again, as is the duty of the essayist, he lets us 
catch a glimpse of his own individuality, not 
suppressing it vigorously, as is the wont of the 
most advanced story-tellers of to-day. 

But still, the book " lets itself be read," to 
use the useful German phrase. However slight 
as a story, it is delightful as the work of an 
accomplished man of letters, deftly sketching 
a bit of scenery here and adroitly outlining a 
bit of character there. And especially does it 
abound in good talk — in good talk which is 
not merely a sequence of clever phrases, but 
really talk, with the flavor of give and take, 
to and fro, hit or miss, cut and thrust, which 
is the essence of friendly conversation. The 
late Lord Houghton declared that " good con- 
versation is to ordinary talk what whist is 



MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 289 

to playing cards"; and Mr. Warner has here 
proved himself a most expert whist - player, 
with the fullest understanding of American 
leads. "A man always talks badly who has 
nothing to say," Voltaire remarked ; but it 
does not follow that the reverse is true, and 
that the man who has something to say is 
sure to talk well. Mr. Warner and Mr. War- 
ner's companions in ' Their Pilgrimage ' have 
always something to say, and something to 
which the reader is delighted to listen ; and 
they say it in such fashion as to make conver- 
sation seem the very cream of culture. 

In ' Their Pilgrimage ' Mr. Warner showed 
that he had a firm grasp of the essential facts 
of American life and character ; in ' A Little 
Journey in the World ' he revealed that he had 
also mastered the art of fiction, and was able 
to fix the reader's attention not on the scenery 
and the chorus which had amused us in the 
earlier book, but on the characters of the men 
and women, and on the influence of these 
characters one on the other. He had turned 
from the externals of existence to the internals. 
He had thrust the panorama into the back- 
ground and concentrated his attention on the 
figures in the foreground. And these figures 
are well worthy of his attention and of ours. 



290 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

He groups together the delicate, sensitive New 
England girl of high ideals and the rather 
common but clever New York girl — of a kind 
seen in the city often enough, and yet not at 
all a typical New York girl, if such an entity 
may be said to exist. He shows us a new 
variety of the English lord whom it is the duty 
of the American girl to reject ; and he makes 
us see what a fine fellow the Englishman is, 
and what a mistake the girl makes in accept- 
ing, instead of his, the love of a Wall Street 
speculator, handsome, bold, scheming, and un- 
scrupulous. And here it is that Mr. Warner 
proves at once his insight into life and his 
newly acquired skill as a story - teller ; he 
makes us see and understand, and even accept 
as inevitable, the slow process of deterioration 
which follows on the mating of a young woman 
of lofty standards with a dominating character 
of coarser and tougher substance. The disin- 
tegration of Margaret's moral fibre under the 
repeated shocks of worldliness, incessantly re- 
curring, until at last the strain breaks down all 
resistance, seems to me one of the finest things 
in recent American literature. 

At the end of 'A Little Journey in the 
World/ the gentle Margaret, after wedding 
the daring speculator Henderson, had suffer- 



MR. C. D.WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 29 1 

ed a slow moral disintegration, under which 
she finally faded away and died, whereupon 
the swift vengeance of Heaven pursued Hen- 
derson, and the book closes with his marriage 
to the easy-going Carmen. That these two 
characters, thus fitly disposed of in ' A Little 
Journey in the World,' should reappear in the 
1 Golden House ' is a surprise, not to say a 
shock, and yet it must be confessed that the 
result justifies Mr. Warner's daring. We can 
see now that the author was right in thinking 
that the career of Henderson, and also the 
career of his second wife, might be carried 
further with advantage. Henderson's career, 
indeed, the author has seen fit to carry out 
to the end — to his sudden and lonely death 
in the midst of his millions. 

Of all the many attempts to represent in fic- 
tion the American money-maker, the man who 
has amassed an immense fortune, and who goes 
on increasing it with no thought of resting from 
his labor, the man who exists solely for the sake 
of making money, surrendering all tastes that 
interfere with this passion, giving up every- 
thing else, abandoning his whole life to gain, 
and not from any sordid avarice, not even from 
any great desire to use what he accumulates, 
but moved mainly by an interest in the sport 



292 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

of speculation, and finding the zest of his life 
in the game of money-making, wholly regard- 
less of the cash value of the stakes — of all the 
many efforts to put such a man before us in the 
pages of a novel, this study of Mr. Warner's 
seems to me to be the most successful. Hen- 
derson is vigorously presented, and we get to 
know him, and to understand how it is that he 
is not unkindly, and that he is absolutely un- 
scrupulous. We perceive why he has no malice 
towards those he injured by his scheming, and 
why he bears them no ill will even after he has 
ruined them. We see how all the better im- 
pulses of the man have been starved and choked 
by the growth of the one all-absorbing passion ; 
and it is not without pity that we discover that 
not only his impulses, but his tastes, his minor 
interests in life, his faculty of enjoyment, have 
been eliminated, one by one, until at last he 
has nothing left but the one thing on which 
he has set his heart, and to which he has bent 
his whole being. Then at length even this 
one thing loses its savor, and is as dust and 
ashes in his mouth. At the very acme and 
climax of his triumph Henderson knows that 
his life has been a failure. 

This boldly projected figure of Henderson 
dominates the book as his exemplars tower 



MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 293 

aloft over the social organization of our time. 
In our modern society the millionaire has in 
great measure taken the place held aforetime 
by the nobleman ; and it may very well be that 
we allow him to enjoy too many of the feudal 
advantages of his predecessor. Perhaps Mr. 
Kidd is right in thinking that we are according 
to captains of industry an undue proportion of 
the powers and of the honors which were for- 
merly bestowed rightly enough on command- 
ers in war. One of the merits of the ' Golden 
House ' is that it forces the reader to take 
thought about society. The book is no tract, 
no parable, no allegory, no Tendenz-Roman even, 
as the Germans phrase it, no novel with a pur- 
pose ; it is a story, pure and simple, with strong- 
ly drawn characters, in whose sayings and do- 
ings we are interested for their own sakes ; but 
none the less even the casual reader who turns 
its pages carelessly has forced upon him a con- 
sciousness that our social system is strangely 
inadequate and startlingly imperfect. 

Perhaps nothing is more harmful to-day than 
the frequent denunciations of the existing order 
of things with the obvious inference that a so- 
ciety so deformed needs to be rooted up and 
cleared away and made over. What ought to 
be clear to us is that, with all the defects of 



2 94 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

the social organization in our time, this organ- 
ization is less defective than it ever was before; 
that there has been steady progress in the 
world from generation to generation ; that 
there has been no century in which the aver- 
age man has not been better off than he was 
in the previous century ; that it is our duty 
to do all that in us lies to help forward this 
progress; and that nothing tends to retard 
this improvement more than violent and in- 
flammatory declamation. The pessimist who 
refuses to believe in any advance is quite as 
wrong as the optimist who denies that there is 
any necessity for a forward movement. Now, 
as always, discontent is a duty, for it is a con- 
dition precedent to progress. It is not dis- 
content that throws the dynamite bomb ; it is 
despair. 

While Mr. Warner's novel is the work of a 
thinker, and while it affords food for thought 
even to the cursory reader, it is wholly free 
from denunciation. By its perusal we are led 
not to wish to destroy society, but rather to 
desire its reorganization ; and we are made at 
least to suspect the complexity of the problem. 
Mr. Warner shows us the poor as well as the 
rich — Mulberry Bend after Madison Avenue — 
and he does not idealize the one more than the 



MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 295 

other. Perhaps, after all, the pinch of poverty 
does not squeeze the soul more than the weight 
of riches — although it numbs the body sooner. 

It is poverty that saves Jack Delancy, who is 
perhaps to be called the hero of the ' Golden 
House,' and who is certainly a most skilful 
piece of portraiture. We all know Jack ; he is 
the clever young fellow, moving easily through 
life along the line of least resistance, and hav- 
ing no shadows in his path except when he 
stands in his own light. If such a young man 
has had the good fortune to be born poor, he 
can save himself, and the world is the richer 
by a fine fellow. If he has the bad luck of 
Jack Delancy, and inherits twenty thousand 
dollars a year, he is not likely to save himself, 
for ennui is the devil's advocate — and as Mr. 
Warner tersely puts it, " wherever the devil is, 
there is always a quorum present for business." 
Even after Jack marries an ideal wife his fate 
is in doubt, and it needs not only her aid but 
the sharp douche of sudden poverty to stimu- 
late him into making the best of his life. 

As it is no fairy tale that Mr. Warner is writ- 
ing, he does not let Jack reform in the twink- 
ling of an eye, but only after a long struggle 
with himself and his habits ; for while a noble 
impulse may make a man volunteer for a for- 



296 ASPECTS OF FICTION 

lorn hope, only a firm will can keep him stead- 
fast under fire. It would be futile to wonder 
how a Parisian novelist would have treated the 
relations of Jack and Carmen, but it may be 
doubted whether that treatment would be as 
calmly truthful as Mr. Warner's. The Amer- 
ican author knew his type when he made Hen- 
derson conscious that Carmen was as " passion- 
less as a diamond." 

How true to life Carmen may be, and how 
accurate Edith Delancy, I do not know ; for 
how is a mere man to decide on the niceties of 
feminine character ? Every novel really worth 
criticising needs two critics — a man to discuss 
the male characters, and a woman to discuss 
the female. It is easy enough for any man to 
say that the heroes of many women's novels 
are impossible, for the most part either prigs 
or brutes ; but may not the woman retort on 
us, and declare the irresistible heroines of men's 
novels equally impossible ? To us men Carmen 
is coherent and convincing ; Edith Delancy is 
almost flawless, and quite too good for that 
very human creature Jack ; Dr. Ruth Leigh is 
most sympathetically drawn ; but what do the 
women think of these creatures of a masculine 
brain? I can bear testimony to the dignity 
and the strength with which Father Damon is 



MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 297 

delineated ; but I lack the knowledge to take 
the stand in behalf of Dr. Ruth, who seems to 
me quite as well conceived, and quite as hap- 
pily presented. 

In this his third work of fiction the author 
is more the master of the art than in the earlier 
studies. He possesses his materials now ; he 
is not possessed by them. He keeps his story 
more firmly in hand ; the construction is sol- 
ider ; the movement is swifter ; and there are 
fewer digressions from the main path. To a 
certain extent the modern novel is the result 
of a marriage of the essay and the drama ; and 
it is natural enough that the child should re- 
semble now one of the parents and now the 
other. In Mr. Warner's hands, as was to be 
expected, the tendency is rather towards the 
essay, yet there is no obtrusion of the nar- 
rator's personality, and there is no lack of 
dramatic force in certain of the situations. 
In more than one of them — in the parting of 
the doctor and the priest, for example — there 
is the swift simplicity of tragedy, inevitable, 
inexorable, final. 

(1894.) 











































' 






•O 1 



r^ 



\ ' 



O0 1 









■**«? 






•0* 



O0 1 






Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2007 



A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 
111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 


















^ ^ 



v > 



























g/r 












•> 









t: 









* s -v 





















,0 c 






^ ^ 






